Finding the Beat - by Nathan Hesselink (Hardcover)

About the Book

Introduces entrainment through the lens of contemporary rock music to explain why humans enjoy listening to music together and what is it about certain beats that captures our attention.

Book Synopsis

Finding the Beat explores humankind's ability, propensity, and enjoyment in finding the beat in live and recorded experiences of music-making through the lens of entrainment, the human capacity to perceive a beat and to synchronize to it. Anyone who has attended a concert, gone to a club, or watched a sporting event has witnessed and/or participated in tapping, clapping, or dancing along with a piece, song, or chant. It doesn't matter who or where you are in the world-as humans we spend a lot of time taking pleasure in matching our bodily movements with a perceived beat.

Drawing upon diverse examples from the North American and British rock repertoire, Nathan Hesselink demonstrates that listeners are gripped in deep, compelling, and socially meaningful ways when musicians play with or against expectations set up by entrainment. Via musicology, music theory, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and cognitive neuroscience, he illustrates the creative, aesthetic, and participatory pleasure and wonder afforded by our collective ability to find the beat.

Review Quotes

"Finding the Beat is an engaging, comprehensive, and illuminating insight into our innate understanding of entrainment. I must admit that I had real difficulty in finding the beat when I first heard Thom play Pyramid Song. Nathan's book has helped me realise that maybe I wasn't winging it quite so much as I thought, as I picked my own route through the rhythmic possibilities of that song." --Philip Selway, drummer for Radiohead

"In this thought-provoking and richly interdisciplinary study, Nathan Hesselink takes us on a fascinating musical journey-one that appropriately begins and ends with Radiohead-in search of a better understanding of that crucial defining feature of rock music, "the beat." Finding the Beat will be essential reading not only for rock scholars but also anyone interested in music cognition, rhythm and meter, or the analysis of popular music more broadly." --Mark Spicer, Professor of Music, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

About the Author

Nathan Hesselink is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a previous Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Asian Studies. The author/editor of four books and 16 articles on Korean traditional drumming and dance, he has recently published on Radiohead, the Police, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.