10.54103/2036-461X/17202
My contribution aims to discuss the topic of rhythm as presented by the classic psychologist and filmologist, Paul Fraisse (1911-1994) in his founding studies, to understand its scope, and to consider the possible inheritance to be spent in contemporary research on film. I will first outline Fraisse’s contribution to the psychology of rhythm, a model grounded both on the value of Gestalt organisation and on related dimensions of sensory-motor activation. Secondly, I will investigate contemporary thinking in this field, showing on the one hand how Fraisse’s contribution still helps the psychology of music in defining rhythmic listening experiences, and on the other how the French scholar’s multilayered notion of time perception finds legitimation in neuroscientific research on timing. Finally, I will delve into film theory. In particular, I will put forward the assumption that the sense of rhythm, due to its values of Gestalt organisation, plays a fundamental role in narrative and event-based viewing, enhancing it; yet, due to the dimensions of sensory-motor activation, sound rhythms, in particular, can induce both bodily and neural entrainment and constitute in film an auditive analogon of those embodied and enactive visual processes recognised by the most recent neurofilmological approaches.
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Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for Filmology?
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Massimo Locatelli
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Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for Filmology?
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                                                                                       Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm:
                                                                                       A Case for Filmology?
                                                                                       Massimo Locatelli, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan




                                                                                       This essay aims to discuss the topic of rhythm as presented by the classic psychologist                Keywords
                                                                                       and filmologist Paul Fraisse (1911-1994) in his founding studies, to understand its scope,           Paul Fraisse
                                                                                       and to consider the possible inheritance to be spent in contemporary research on film.
                                                                                       I will first outline Fraisse’s contribution to the psychology of rhythm, a model grounded
                                                                                                                                                                                                Rhythm
                                                                                       both on the value of Gestalt organisation and on related dimensions of sensory-motor                      Gesltat
                                                                                       activation. Secondly, I will investigate contemporary thinking in this field, showing on               Filmology
                                                                                       the one hand how Fraisse’s contribution still helps the psychology of music in defining             Sound studies
                                                                                       rhythmic listening experiences, and on the other how the French scholar’s multilayered                       DOI
                                                                                       notion of time perception finds legitimation in neuroscientific research on timing.
                                                                                                                                                                                              10.54103/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       Finally, I will delve into film theory. In particular, I will put forward the assumption that
                                                                                                                                                                                       2036-461X/17202
                                                                                       the sense of rhythm, due to its values of Gestalt organisation, plays a fundamental
                                                                                       role in narrative and event-based viewing, enhancing it; yet, due to the dimensions of
                                                                                       sensory-motor activation, sound rhythms, in particular, can induce both bodily and
                                                                                       neural entrainment and constitute in film an auditive analogon of those embodied and
                                                                                       enactive visual processes recognised by the most recent neurofilmological approaches.




                                                                                         Rhythm is a Gestalt, but it is much more: a preferential mode of uniting
                                                                                       perception and action, thze source of social manifestations and the basis of arts
                                                                                       of succession and movement.
                                                                                                                                           Paul Fraisse, Is Rhythm a Gestalt?



                                                                                       PAUL FRAISSE
                                                                                         Paul Fraisse (1911-1994), a French psychologist, who was a pupil of Albert
                                                                                       Michotte van den Berck in Louvain and a collaborator with leading exponents of
                                                                                       the French school of psychology of perception, made his mark on research into the
                                                                                       experience of time as few other scholars of his age did, significantly contributing
                                                                                       to founding the studies which after him came to be known as chronopsychology.
                                                                                       In The Psychology of Time (1957) he demonstrated the existence of a multiplicity
                                                                                       of temporal structures in the life of the individual, and shifted the attention of then
                                                                                       nascent chronobiology from endogenous mechanisms to external conditioning,


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                           83
     making explicit the dimension of adaptation to periodicities connected both ‘with
     the main biological activities of the organism, namely motility, rest and food’
     and with induced rhythms, ‘which bear no relationship with organic alterations’,
     hence induced in the laboratory or, hypothetically, attributable to social activity.1
        Among social activities, Fraisse always attributed an important role in his
     studies to creative practices, such as music, supremely considered the art
     of time. Moreover, he also followed his master Michotte in the years of his
     filmological adventure, when between the end of the Second World War and the
     early 1960s he tried to establish a first methodological study with categories
     of the experimental psychology of the new media, primarily cinema.2 Together
     with Germaine de Montmollin, another of Michotte’s students, Fraisse conducted
     research into the understanding and memorisation of films for the Sorbonne
     filmology laboratories. As its starting point the research took the famous studies
     by Frederic Bartlett on the understanding of narrative and, as in this case, it
     strongly emphasised the active role of the subject in the cognitive process.3
        Fraisse did not continue his film studies, but these early researches were useful
     to focus attention on the themes of the perception of time.4 In The Psychology
     of Time he succeeded in defining some essential traits that are still the basis
     of research today: the twofold nature of the experience of time, based on both
     immediacy and duration, in fact on multiple durations (as we shall see in §3),
     and the organised nature of this experience directed towards synchrony and
     succession, such that the tick-tock of the clock would never become a tock-tick
     nor a waltz change its tempo.5 The unity of the perceived succession between
     two minimum intervals, our clock or dance pattern, then forms what Fraisse
     calls ‘the psychological or perceived present’.6 The study of the experience of
     time would from then on focus on the measurement on the one hand of the
     subjective and intersubjective perception of duration, as a factor that qualifies
     every temporal experience,7 and on the other of the dimensions relating to
     rhythm and repetition, as its structuring element.8
        Indeed, in keeping with his chronopsychological studies, Fraisse recognised
     rhythm as being above all a perceptual process with its basis in Gestalt
     reorganisation. The perception of time, in relation to rhythmic phenomena,
     recognises pregnant forms, which tend to be perceived first or produce a
     greater perceptual impact. ‘The reorganization takes the following two forms:
     differentiation, which sharpens the differences, and assimilation, which tends to
     diminish or suppress minor differences. Rhythmic reproductions are constituted
     by intervals having two values: short durations and long durations, which have a
     ratio of approximately 2/1; within each category, intervals are equal.’9 The short
     duration acts as a structural basis of rhythmic understanding, close to the limit
     of immediacy and perceptible in the form of the ‘collection’ of stimuli; the long
     duration is constituted in relation to the short duration. It is the place of duration
     and the constitution of multiple durations.10
        The repetition of the formal scheme in a succession of homogeneous groups
     separated by pauses, tending to last for long durations, is fundamental in the
     recognition of rhythms. The pause, as Fraisse notes, is conceptually different



84                                         Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
from the interval, even when it consists of an identical time span. It is a linkage, at
the limit ‘analogous to the role of frame […] in the case of spatial figures’.11 While
the structure in intervals of the single measure is related to the relationship
between background and figure, the grouping and rhythm, albeit operating on
the same Gestalt bases, through the pause-repetition mechanism, transfer the
formal dynamism of the single unit to series of complex units that may require
sensory-motor involvement by the subject. Psychological historians such as
Fernández and Travieso have strongly emphasised this latter component in
Fraisse’s thinking about rhythm, namely the motor basis of rhythmic experience.12
  We can distinguish three steps in Fraisse’s research that establish the
rhythmic experience as eminently linked to body motor sequences. Firstly, in his
laboratory experiments, Fraisse recognized a spontaneous motor rhythm, which
was set within the temporal arc of the perceived present, i.e. on average within
the band between 15/20 and 150/200 hundredths of a second, with a preference
for intervals close to 60 hundredths of a second.13 A sort of basic rhythm, that
of rocking or tapping the foot to the rhythm of music, that enables the subject
to physically enter the rhythmic experiential field.14 Next, he demonstrates that
spontaneous rhythmisation is the result of a sensory-motor response or ‘motor
induction’ at regular intervals that activates a precise system of anticipation
of bodily movement with respect to the rhythmic beat. Cadences lower than
20 hundredths of a second and higher than 180 hundredths of a second, on
the other hand, require conscious intervention and memory recall to maintain
synchronisation.15 Finally, he describes each rhythmic fraction included in the
motor rhythm band as a place of spontaneous grouping, which allows its overall
perceptual organisation on the basis of precise logics of intensity (accent) and
succession (pause). The idea is that the accent elicits the repetition also of
complex isochronous groups (the rhythmic experience) and that the rhythmic
movement, or its outline, is synchronised with the accent.16



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RHYTHM
  The correspondence or circularity between a perceptual mechanism that
generally responds to Gestalt laws of perception and a sensory-motor activation
system that intervenes on the level of basic rhythmic synchronisation seems to
lead us back to the contemporary debate. The psychological field today implicitly
or explicitly refers to cognitive theories of time, generally based on the notion of
an internal clock at the neurophysiological level and on attentional and decisional
mechanisms at the psychological level.17 But even researchers who share
this paradigm address the problem of the relationship with the pre-cognitive
dimension of experience, supplementing their research through a comparison
with theoretical approaches of a markedly phenomenological nature, in which
time on a psychological level is a function of the neurophysiological response
or arousal.18 Understandably, the latter have a strong impact on studies in
the cultural field, where case studies raise issues that are difficult to relate


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     to the rigid protocols of laboratory research. A constructivist vision, based
     on the recognition of qualitatively different processes, such as that of Paul
     Fraisse, could certainly assist the dialogue. Three key concepts taken from the
     psychology of music should be reconsidered after neuroscientific verification.
        Entrainment. The synchronisation of the sensory-motor response with the
     sound stimulus, especially in the presence of complexity or variations of the
     stimulus, is an emblematic case of this. Today we know that synchronisation,
     which we now refer to with the term entrainment, can occur at both a sensory
     and a neural level. Jones and Large, while working within an attentional model,
     conjecture, in the Dynamic Attending Theory, that the experience of listening
     to rhythmic stimuli develops a continuous and cyclical temporal experience,
     a transition from state to state and an internal resonance that dynamises the
     attentional effort.19 More recently, Chen, Penhune and Zatorre shored up the
     idea that different motor areas underlie the perception of rhythms, while rhythm
     fosters functional connectivity between auditory and motor networks; in these
     fMRI-based studies, musical rhythm processing has been shown to activate
     (also) neural mirroring, in analogy to visual perception.20 In the psychology of
     music, an attempt has recently been made to redefine the notion of entrainment
     by relating it to the associated experience of the topical and exciting moment of
     listening, and measuring it in terms of peak experience.21 The peak can also be
     reached through other paths, for instance melodic ones, but a fundamental key
     seems to be that of rhythmic beat timing, and the system of rhythmic accents
     identified by Paul Fraisse comes across as a good example of the construction
     of peak experiences.
        Anticipation. The most recent studies have also confirmed Fraisse’s intuition
     of the anticipatory character of the sensory-motor response to the rhythmic
     stimulus. David Huron, in his influential ITPRA model, strongly insists on the
     centrality of the expectation-prediction system as a cue to understanding the
     music experience.22 Working in an evolutionary perspective, Huron stresses
     that rhythm not only concerns low-order relationships (short rhythmic motives)
     but also higher-order relationships (meters), whereas ‘the basis for temporal
     perception is not periodicity — but predictability’, as it is an accurate prediction
     of the biological goal of expectation.23 A fundamental part of contemporary
     research rests on this premise. More specifically, the actual coupling between
     the auditory system and the dopamine system (referred to as the reward system)
     has been theorised, and in particular the two-phase structure of this coupling. In
     laboratory tests, a peak of pleasure felt while listening to a much-loved piece of
     music was connected to the activation of one sub-portion of the striatum. But a
     first anticipatory phase occurred a few seconds before in a different sub-region
     of the striatum.24 This occurrence indicates that the pleasure of the musical
     experience is to all intents and purposes built, at the neurophysiological level,
     on the interplay between expectation and resolution, an interplay that rhythm
     and repetition can expand and reiterate endlessly.
        Attention. The complexity of higher-order structures or musical meters has
     been widely debated. For Justin London, metrical experience ‘involves our



86                                        Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we
abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time’.25 London
interestingly proposes a model, the Many Meters Hypothesis, which considers
meter as a kind of “learnable” entrainment, a synchronization of our attention
and response to the rhythms of the musical environment which we are exposed
to. London openly admits his debt to Paul Fraisse. Thus, physical involvement
can develop within metrically complex compositions and a universe of
different possible interpretations, styles, and arrangements.26 From a purely
neurophysiological point of view, it has also proved possible to describe a
double circuit that integrates a typically bottom-up path, that of listening to
music, with a typically top-down path, that of memorisation and recall.27



THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TIMING
   At this point, we need to delve into the core component of our rhythmical
experience, assuming with contemporary research that the notion of timing
describes our ability to live in time through the perception of rhythms and
intervals. At this point the topic stops being purely a musicological one.
   Today we define the rhythmic perception that arises from the constant
interaction between the auditory and motor systems of our mind, directed
towards the recognition and anticipation of temporal organisations of
experience, as beat-based timing.28 The beat is understood as the value of the
psychological response to the rhythmic sequence and therefore epitomises in
itself the organising value of the clicking of the metronome and that of a sensory-
motor activation mechanism.29 In beat timing, succession and repetition seem
to be a training ground for many important challenges that arise from it. These
challenges above all concern the temporal structuring of perception itself, first,
and clearly describe some characteristics of our involvement, namely a) the
predictivity of experience. We already know that one of the ‘miracles’ of human
cognition of time is the ability to anticipate rhythms (which enables us to dance,
for example);30 b) its duration: the cyclical nature of the rhythm makes it possible
to prolong the sensory-motor response and timing;31 and c) its permanence: we
are capable of maintaining the sense of the rhythm that we have experienced
for many cycles after the stimulus has ceased.32
   The pattern of repetition, as we have seen, is not attributable only to the
simplest rhythms, but also to complex meters and events stimulating predictive
or attentional behaviours. We need to introduce a second timing level, called
interval timing, in which one analyses the system of recognition of complex
rhythmic temporal experiences and assesses their duration.
   As concerns this dimension, to date we have far fewer laboratory observations.
We can still only consider this issue on the level of hypotheses. However,
in recent years, scientific research has widely explored different scales for
assessing the passing of time (or in general the experience of time). In particular,
while musical rhythm, like the rhythm of language, is related to a scale of


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      87
     milliseconds/seconds, many activities in our daily lives are related to the scale
     of seconds/minutes, which psychologists often refer to in terms of interval
     timing, and which recurs in the most explicitly aware activities involving the
     cognitive system.33 Studies of this kind, again, tell us of the central role played
     by memorisation and learning processes in the musical experience.34
       The sense of individual time is therefore constructed starting from the
     synchronisation of different time frames, which include times of long-duration
     (such as the circadian rhythms regulating the alternation between sleeping
     and waking), all of which, in the light of recent analyses of neuroimaging,
     work on a semi-autonomous basis.35 In any case, in a logic of layering of the
     neural activation systems of the rhythmic and temporal sense, the perception
     of temporally organised stimuli is reinterpreted in terms of a binary functioning
     in different neural regions: on the one side an accumulation mechanism, which
     can correspond to the traditional internal clock, rhythmically organises the
     entry of stimuli (though they may not be rhythmic in origin), and therefore it
     can activate attentional and/or memorisation mechanisms. On the other side a
     comparison mechanism re-processes the data of the internal clock in the light
     of analogue or parallel systems and of the mnestic activity, and allows for an
     estimation of different complex intervals.36
       If this is the case, despite the methodological issues that exploring the level
     of interval timing raises, perhaps it is not out of place to take as a first working
     hypothesis that the idea of enjoying audio-visual media (listening to music or
     watching a movie) is an essential training ground for a psychology of rhythm
     and apply it to complex segments and repetitions with a duration of seconds and
     minutes: meters and hyper-meters on the one hand, shots, scenes, sequences,
     musical insertions on the other. Music and film share the power to accumulate
     modules organised by rhythm but based on intervals and durations organised
     in the order of seconds and minutes (the order of our internal clocks engaged
     in interval timing), and to refine our power of comparison (of rhythmic-temporal
     dimensions).
       Starting from these strongly embodied images and sounds we shall
     nonetheless finally restore a cognitive dimension of the sense of rhythm,
     especially where the perception of durations and times implies evaluations.
     Evaluating and deciding, hence reasoning on a temporal basis, is a process that
     in turn acts on the neurophysiological mechanisms of timing, in keeping with a
     logic that could be defined as re-entry: the decision-making system ultimately
     intervenes on the internal clocks — whatever their form or scale — and modifies
     their computation.37



     FOR A FILMOLOGY OF RHYTHM
       The basic assumption of this essay actually concerns the usefulness of
     reference to Fraisse’s work in contemporary research on film and the moving
     image. Film culture has always dealt with the problem of rhythm, both as a



88                                        Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
question of style, and as a tool to get the audience involved. Cultural historians
have shown how there is a qualifying link between the sense of modernity
embodied by cinema and its avant-gardes in the first half of the 20th century, and
the visual rhythms with which directors and editors experimented on multiple
levels.38 The ‘founding fathers’ of film theory all gave ample space to reflection
on rhythm, influencing subsequent debates: Béla Balázs’ film aesthetics, on
which generations of directors were trained, prescribes a relationship of a
musical type (harmony, counterpoint) between the ‘rhythm of the shots’, that
is the degree of dynamism of the image, and the ‘rhythm of the montage’.39 In
the sound era, by the mid-1930s, film rhythm was widely understood as the
product of editing sound and image and of synchronizing multiple layers or
strata of temporal development in an effort to gain control over the image.40
Film semiotics was later able to systematise the many possible regimes of
inner- and inter-textual relationships apt to govern narrative film rhythm.41
   Sergei Eisenstein has proposed the broadest and most refined reflection on
cinematic rhythm, integrating the different rhythmic codes into a unitary concept
of vertical editing. Vertical editing aims to involve the viewer ‘mechanically’ in
a sensuous experience. The Russian director found his first inspiration in the
primordial and tribal rhythm of the drum, and then broadened his observation
to more complex rhythms of multiple cultural expressions. The most evident
break with respect to Balázs and the classic style of montage can be found in
the principle of the ‘opposite movement’ (otkaznoe dviženie) or mutual contrast
between the elements, which enhances the impact of film rhythm by emphasizing
its own dialectical process.42 The Eisensteinian perspective influenced later
reflection on the potential of film for rhythmic involvement. We can distinguish
between broad categories of intervention: one of a meta-psychological nature,
one of phenomenological inspiration, and one in the cognitivist area.
   The first, which probably arises from Christian Metz’s founding observations
on the fetish of technology,43 is best defined in Raymond Bellour’s most recent
work.44 For Bellour, film has a corporeal quality that produces the constant
illusion of a sensory, almost hypnotic ‘agreement’ with the spectator’s body.
Bellour relies on Daniel Stern’s concept of the ‘present moment’, which is in
turn indebted to French phenomenology and Paul Fraisse’s ‘psychological
present’. In Stern a timing correspondence stems from the immediateness of
any relationship, starting from the first face-to-face contacts of the child.45 For
Bellour, film gives us the illusion of a similar immediate, bodily correspondence.
Rhythm defines here the ‘transmodal character’ of this correspondence,
ensuring the coordination of sound and image.46
   The conclusions of the authors of the second line of thinking are indeed not
far off: for example Vivian Sobchack also stresses the embodied character of
rhythmically expressed ‘temporal reciprocity’.47 And already according to Jean
Mitry the phenomenological perspective accounts for the subjective and sensorial
value of rhythmic experience: rhythm is an intentional structure, which opens
up to the construction of meaning through a perceptual experience. Notably,
Mitry states that this experience must be interpreted with psychological tools


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     89
     like those enunciated by Paul Fraisse, from the subjective value of rhythmic
     perception to the binary Gestalt principle of assimilation and differentiation (see
     earlier in §1).48
        The psychological implications of the experience of rhythm have also been
     considered in the third area of study. In this case, a multi-layered notion of
     rhythm, as inherited from Paul Fraisse, could offer a point of balance between
     models for understanding film experience which, by analogy with what happens
     in the more general framework of the psychological and neuroscientific debate,
     underline the cognitive challenge of film comprehension and narrative,49
     and models that have strongly reassessed the pre-cognitive and embodied
     dimensions of the act of viewing.50 The Event segmentation theory postulates
     that continuity editing matches our brain’s use of discrete representation to
     predict the immediate course of events, and to create an internal, interconnected
     representation in memory.51 David Bordwell, though, from a clear cognitivist
     point of view, has insisted on the affective intensification effects of modern
     editing rhythm in terms of cutting pace,52 while Torben Grodal has brought back
     the effectiveness of the filmic experience to the body rhythms (‘fluctuations’) of
     the viewer.53 On this basis, Karen Pearlman has suggested reconsidering the
     work of the editor as a real technique of the body, assigning to rhythm the task
     of raising tension and release.54 This reflects also Walter Murch’s influential
     considerations on the ‘natural’ cut, based both on the actor’s movement and the
     viewer’s blinking of the eyes.55 In this respect, research into mirror neurons has
     had a strong impact and enabled authors like Gallese and Guerra to strongly
     anchor film viewing to a Simulation theory: mirror neuron activation pushes us
     to an embodied simulation of the character’s action and camera movements.56
     The work of Eugeni, Balzaretti, Cavaletti, and D’Aloia demonstrates how in
     film viewing ‘the body schemata of movement and action possess an intrinsic
     temporal dimension’, and that this temporal dimension is expressed ‘both in
     terms of speed and duration’.57 The Italian authors questioned the influence of
     different editing rhythms (neutral, classical, intensified) on time perception.
        All these contributions solicit a ‘somatic intelligence’ of rhythm in film and
     the moving image,58 allowing us to extend its semiotics from a logic of control
     and sense strata to a logic of dynamic resonance and ‘production of affects’.59
     Overall, though, they prevalently come across as being focused on visual factors,
     probably the most immediate and the easiest to test. An additional strand of
     research we need to consider is therefore research on film music. On the one
     hand, related studies place great weight on the aspect of emotional activation
     of the original musical soundtrack.60 On the other hand, general reflections on
     affective intensification have been also related to dimensions such as those of
     the spatialisation of sound61 and the amplitude of usable frequencies following
     the introduction of noise reduction. The richness of timbre and sounds and
     noises of the contemporary film soundtrack, and, last but not least, the volume
     of sound in the cinema seem to enhance the emotional involvement of the
     audience.62
        Conversely, there are few specific and dedicated in-depth laboratory studies



90                                       Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
on the auditive dimensions of film rhythm, or on multimodal and cross-modal
rhythm processing, an exception being the recent work by Swenberg and
Carlgren. Here, once again, it has been proved that ‘the relationship of the
visual beat to the musical beat affects human viewers’ visual perception of the
edits’, by enhancing both continuity and discontinuity effects.63 Carol Vernallis
also aptly described the particular ‘responsiveness’ of video music editing to
musical rhythms.64 This allows me to take a step further.
   Paul Fraisse had already studied the relationships between visual stimuli and
sound stimuli, and his consolidated starting point lay in the basic differences
between the two sensory systems: e.g., the response to the sound stimulus
is faster than the visual one, the sound stimulus seems longer than a visual
one of equal duration.65 These observations are substantiated by contemporary
psychological and neuroscientific studies, which confirm the greater accuracy of
the timing in auditory stimuli than in visual ones. Sound appears to be a more
immediate instrument, but also a more precise mechanism.66 The signals of the
visual organisation require a longer time to re-process and also a longer time to
learn in childhood.67 We could refer to an auditive efficiency, in respect to visual
perception. The French scholar further reported a fundamental qualitative
difference between visual rhythm perception and sound rhythm perception.
Listening allows a direct connection and synchronisation between the bodily
response and rhythmic stimuli (entrainment), while vision allows only formal
recognition of repetitions and symmetries that tend not to lead to a synchronised
bodily response.68 Jean Mitry confirmed this view, affirming that film bases
its rhythm on “discontinuous forms”, and therefore cannot achieve bodily
synchronization through visual means only, if not on very particular occasions.
An example of this would be the master sequence of the Teutonic Knights in
Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938).69 Eisenstein himself, criticising the
complex scene of the religious dances in Storm over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin,
1928), noticed that in this case the visual editing just foregrounded an abstract
cadence of spatial repetitions and combinations (metric montage, in his terms).
He explicitly asked here for a musical track, in order to gain real rhythmical
effectiveness.70
   We can then put forward a second working hypothesis regarding the role of
sound rhythms in film and the moving image. Rhythmic aptitude in listening,
due to the automatisms of sensory-motor activation and synchronisation
that constitute it, seems to be functional to film experience in the same way
as the embodied and enactive visual processes recognised by the most
recent neurofilmological theories are. That is, not only as simple emotional
reinforcement, as in the case of a melodic commentary, but as a bodily scheme
of action and movement, which allows an embodied and enactive response
to the stimulus. The differences between the visual and the auditive-induced
involvement need, indeed, to be stressed: in the first case, neural mirroring
and simulation involve a personal relationship with a represented subject or
action, while rhythmic entrainment does not require it. Furthermore, we might
think that this response is not simply simulated but shared, with the body of the


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     text and the spectator community’s bodies. An impulse of extreme power and
     intensity. The limitation of the hypothesis lies in the lack of laboratory evidence,
     but the studies mentioned previously in support of the Dynamic attending theory
     (§2) seem to confirm at least its legitimacy. For now, we have confirmation of
     phenomena of both sensory and neural entrainment.



     CONCLUSIONS
       We have enough material to draw a conclusion, in a first attempt to delineate
     a Rhythmic Involvement Theory for audiovisual Media Experience (RITMEx).
     According to Fraisses’ founding definitions, and later debates on the psychology
     of rhythm, the neuroscience of timing, and the theory of film and the moving
     image, RITMEx can state at least that:
       1. Rhythmic involvement in audiovisual media experiences is grounded both
     on a value of Gestalt organisation and on related dimensions of sensory-motor
     activation (§1) and is generally to be interpreted as a training ground for our
     multilayered timing skills (§3).
       2. Rhythmic involvement can be traced back to two different ways of
     experiencing audiovisual media: on the one hand, a dynamic mode, closely
     but not necessarily related to style-centered filmmaking, music videos, and
     social media contents, where rhythm itself ensures entrainment and embodied
     anticipation (§2). On the other, a narrative or event-related one, closely but not
     necessarily related to continuity editing, that exploits the enhancing effects of
     rhythmic stimuli in order to reinforce attentional focusing and low and high-
     order cognitive prediction skills (§2 and 4).
       3. Sound rhythms are more effective than visual ones in beat timing and
     short interval timing; they can induce both bodily and neural entrainment and
     consequently a dynamic mode of experience. They are a grounding element in a
     ‘somatic’ relationship to the body of the film or any moving image viewed. They
     can nonetheless also have enhancing, empowering, or even contrapunctual
     value in narrative or event-based experiences (§4).




92                                        Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
Notes
 1
    Paul Fraisse, Psychologie du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), eng. ed. Psychology
of Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 28.
  2
    On the filmological enterprise in post-war Paris and its relationship with psychology, see at least Cinémas,
19.2-3 (special issue La filmologie, de nouveau, ed. by François Albera and Martin Lefebvre, 2009).
  3
    Paul Fraisse and Germaine de Montmollin, ‘Sur la mémoire des films’, Revue Internationale de Filmologie,
9 (1952), 37–69 (69). See also Frederic Charles Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social
Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 64–84.
  4
     In the course of the above-mentioned study, Fraisse collected data on the judgment of duration that
enabled him to subsequently demonstrate that the judgment of duration of single actions which one is
called on to make directly tends to underestimate the time taken. This contrasts with the judgment of
duration of complex activities, not clearly addressed and of which in particular one is a spectator: ‘For a
spectator the interest, although real enough, does not give the task unity. The act of perception has its end
in itself and not in an objective to be reached or a task to be carried out.’ Fraisse, Psychology of Time, 228.
  5
    Fraisse, Psychology of Time, 98. ‘Humans tend to perceive an isochronous stream of identical sounds as
having alternating strong and weak notes — the “tick tock” phenomenon’. J. Daniel Cameron and Jessica A.
Grahn, ‘Perception of Rhythm’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm, ed. by Russel Hartenberger and
Ryan McClelland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020), 20–38 (21).
  6
    Fraisse, Psychology of Time, 84–85.
  7
    Fraisse, Estimation and Perception of Time, Annual Review of Psychology, 35 (1984), 1–36.
  8
     Fraisse brought together all of his studies on rhythm in a monograph published in France in 1974,
Psychologie du rythme, which was soon translated into Italian, of which only an abridged version is
available in English, collected by Diana Deutsch in the first edition of her influential Psychology of Music:
Paul Fraisse, ‘Rhythm and Tempo’, in The Psychology of Music, ed. by Diana Deutsch (New York: Academic
Press, 1982), 149–180. We will refer here to the Italian edition: Fraisse, Psycologie du rythme (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1974), it. ed. Psicologia del ritmo (Roma: Armando, 1979).
  9
    Fraisse, ‘Is Rhythm a Gestalt?’, in Gestalttheorie in der modernen Psychologie, ed. by Suitbert Ertel, Lilly
Kemmler and Michael Stadler (Darmstadt: Steinkopff, 1975), 227–232 (231).
  10
      Fraisse, Psicologia del ritmo, 82. Note that the distinction between a short and a long time is still the
basis of one of the fundamental tasks in psychological research into time, termed temporal bisection: John
Wearden, The Psychology of Time Perception (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 71–83.
  11
      Fraisse, ‘Is Rhythm a Gestalt?’, 229.
  12
      Marcos Fernández and David Travieso, ‘Paul Fraisse y la psicología del ritmo’, Revista de Historia de la
Psicología, 27.2-3 (2006), 31–43.
  13
      Fraisse, Psicologia del ritmo, 52.
  14
      Ibidem, 43–47.
  15
      Fraisse particularly stresses that they involve systematic errors in response, ibidem, 50–58.
  16
      Fraisse, Psicologia del ritmo, 67–68. ‘These productions would have a perceptual regulation (grouping
and structuration) but the basis would be motoric’, Fraisse, ‘Is Rhythm a Gestalt?’, 232.
  17
      In general, I refer to John Wearden’s compendium, and to the page he devotes to the relation between
attention and timing, 88–102.
  18
       The works of Droit-Volet stress the importance of sensory-motor states in the perception of time,
e.g. Sandrine Gil and Sylvie Droit-Volet, ‘Emotional Time Distortions: The Fundamental Role of Arousal’,
Cognition and Emotion, 26.5 (2012), 847–862, and in general the discussion in Wearden, 105–115.
  19
       Mary Riess Jones, ‘Time, Our Lost Dimension: Toward a New Theory of Perception, Attention, and
Memory’, Psychological Review, 83.5 (1976), 323–355; Edward W. Large and Mary Riess Jones, ‘The Dynamics
of Attending: How People Track Time-varying Events’, Psychological Review, 106.1 (1999), 119–159. For a
critical discussion of Dynamic Attending Theory and an updating of its neuroscientific foundations: Anna-
Katharina R. Bauer, Manuela Jaeger, Jeremy D. Thorne, Alexandra Bendixen and Stefan Debener, ‘The
Auditory Dynamic Attending Theory Revisited: A Closer Look at the Pitch Comparison Task’, Brain Research,
1626 (2015), 198–210.
  20
      Joyce L. Chen, Virginia B. Penhune and Robert J. Zatorre, ‘Moving on Time: Brain Network for Auditory-


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                         93
motor Synchronization is Modulated by Rhythm Complexity and Musical Training’, Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 20 (2008), 226–239, and ‘Listening to Musical Rhythms Recruits Motor Regions of the Brain’,
Cerebral Cortex, 18.12 (2008), 2844–2854.
  21
     Alf Gabrielsson, John Whaley and John Sloboda, ‘Peak Experiences in Music’, in The Oxford Handbook
of Music Psychology, ed. by Suan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 745–758.
  22
      ‘A mnemonic for the sequence of five expectation-related responses: Imagination response, Tension
response, Prediction response, Reaction response, Appraisal response.’ David Huron, Sweet Anticipation:
Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006), 7–18 and 416.
  23
     Ibidem, 199.
  24
       The striatum is a subcortical nucleus of the telencephalon, involved in many cognitive functions,
including the motoric and reward systems. Valorie N. Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain
Dagher and Robert J. Zatorre, ‘Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release During Anticipation and Experience
of Peak Emotion to Music’, Nature Neuroscience, 14.2 (2011), 257–262.
  25
     Justin London, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meters (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 4.
  26
      ‘A listener’s metric competence resides in her or his knowledge of a very large number of context-
specific metrical timing patterns’, ibidem, 152–153.
  27
      Yue Ding, Yang Zhang, Wenjing Zhou, Zhipei Ling, Juan Huang, Bo Hong and Xiaoqin Wang, ‘Neural
Correlates of Music Listening and Recall in the Human Brain’, Journal of Neuroscience, 39.41 (2019), 8112–
8123.
  28
      ‘This beat-based form of sensory-motor timing allows humans to flexibly extract a regular temporal
structure from a range of rhythms, from simple isochronous sequences, in which all the intervals are
identical, to more-complex meters like those of waltzes, marches, and sambas.’ Virginia B. Penhune and
Robert J. Zatorre, ‘Rhythm and Time in the Premotor Cortex’, PLoS Biology, 17.6 (2019), 1–6 (1). See also,
for a general description and bibliographic overview, Cameron and Grahn, ‘Perception of Rhythm.’
  29
     Cameron and Grahn, ‘The Neuroscience of Rhythm’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. by
Suan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 357–368.
  30
     For example, in the laboratory, the participants required to drum while listening to a rhythm anticipate
the finger stroke by approx. 50 ms: Li-Ann Leow and Jessica A. Grahn, ‘Neural Mechanisms of Rhythm
Perception: Present Findings and Future Directions’, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 829
(2014), 325–338 (327). On the neurophysiological level, studies based on electroencephalographic research
have also shown how, when listening to isochronous rhythms, the oscillations of the beta wave range
appear to indicate ‘anticipation of regular, expected tones’, because they end after the sound, but reappear
before the next sound. See Cameron and Grahn, ‘The Neuroscience of Rhythm’, 362.
  31
     ‘If a sound is predictably repeated, induced responses may be observed around the time of the expected
sound, and may occur even if the sound is omitted’, ibidem, 363.
  32
     See again Penhune and Zatorre, 2019.
  33
     ‘Time estimation refers to processing in the range of seconds and minutes and is generally seen as the
conscious perception of time.’ Michael D. Mauk and Dean V. Buonomano, ‘The Neural Basis of Temporal
Processing’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27 (2004), 307–340 (309).
  34
       Benjamin P. Gold, Marcus T. Pearce, Ernest Mas-Herrero and Alain Dagher, Robert J. Zatorre,
‘Predictability and Uncertainty in the Pleasure of Music: A Reward for Learning?’, Journal of Neuroscience,
39.47 (2019), 9397–9409.
  35
     Note that, rather than referring to dedicated circuits, the most recent proposals are theorising that on
the neurophysiological level timing is an intrinsic property of every neural circuit. Cf. Hugo Merchant and
Victor de Lafuente, ‘Introduction to the Neurobiology of Interval Timing’, in Neurobiology of Interval Timing,
ed. by Hugo Merchant and Victor de Lafuente (New York: Springer, 2016), 1–13 (10).
  36
      ‘Accumulator and comparator functioning of the internal clock are mediated by distinct as well as
partially overlapping neural regions’, Elaine B. Wencil, H. Branch Coslett, Geoffrey K. Aguirre and Anjan
Chatterjee, ‘Carving the Clock at Its Component Joints: Neural Bases for Interval Timing’, Journal of
Neurophysiology, 104.1 (2010), 160–168 (160).
  37
     Hedderik van Rijn, Bon-Mi Gu and Warren H. Meck, ‘Dedicated Clock/Timing-circuit Theories of Interval
Timing and Timed Performance’, in Neurobiology of Interval Timing, ed. by Merchant and de Lafuente, 75–99



94                                                              Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
(76).
  38
     Laurent Guido, L’Age du rythme. Cinéma, musicalité et culture du corps dans les années 1900-1930
(Lausanne: Payot, 2007), Michael Cowan, Technology’s Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism
(London: School of Advanced Study, 2011).
  39
     Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp 2001), 50 (my
translation).
  40
      Cf. Lisa Jacobs, Film Rhythm After Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2015).
  41
     Cf. at least the grounding project of a grande syntagmatique, Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics
of the Cinema (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). More recently, Eugeni proposed to
articulate film rhythms in three components: segmentation of the visual and sound continuum, evaluation
of the reciprocal lengths of the segments, and detection of visual and sound accentuation, Ruggero Eugeni,
Semiotica dei media. Le forme dell’esperienza (Roma: Carocci, 2010), 86ff.
  42
     Sergei M. Eisenstein, Il metodo (2002), vol. 1 (Venice: Marsilio, 2018), 183 and 203. A keen scholar of
Eisenstein’s work, Jean Mitry, has included the entire classic debate on montage in a broader reflection
on rhythmic styles, Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions universitaires,
1963).
  43
     ‘Cinema in its physical state’, Metz, ‘Le signifiant imaginaire’, Communications, 23 (1975), 3–55 (52).
  44
     Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009).
  45
      Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York and London:
Norton&C., 2004), 32–33.
  46
     Bellour, 162–163.
  47
     Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2004), 116.
  48
     Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1965), 166–171.
  49
      See at least David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985), and more recent studies of the neuroscientific foundation such as James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan,
‘Movies, Evolution, and Mind: From Fragmentation to Continuity’, The Evolutionary Review, 4.3 (2013), 25–
35, Tim J. Smith, ‘Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity’, Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind,
1 (2012), 1–27.
  50
     For an overview, see Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. by Arthur P. Shimamura
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Neurofilmology: Audiovisual Studies and the
Challenge of Neuroscience, ed. by Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni, Cinéma & Cie, 22-23 (2014), and Dan
Shaw, ‘Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory: A Neurophysiological Foundation for Cinematic Empathy’,
in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. by Katherine Thomson-Jones (London and New York:
Routledge, 2016), 148–162.
  51
      Jeffrey M. Zacks and Khena M. Swallow, ‘Event Segmentation’, Current Directions in Psychological
Science, 14.2 (2007), 80–84.
  52
      Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
  53
     Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997), 42.
  54
     Karen Pearlman, Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit (Burlington and Oxford: Focalpress, 2009).
  55
     Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press,
1995), 69.
  56
     Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, The Empathic Screen Cinema and Neuroscience (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For a criticism of the Simulation theory of film: Malcolm Turvey, ‘Mirror
Neurons and Film Studies: A Cautionary Tale from a Serious Pessimist’, Projections: The Journal for Movies
and Mind, 3 (2020), 21–46.
  57
     Ruggero Eugeni, Stefania Balzarotti, Federica Cavaletti, Adriano D’Aloia, ‘It Doesn’t Seem_It, But It Is. A
Neurofilmological Approach to the Subjective Experience of Moving-Image Time’, in The Extended Theory of
Cognitive Creativity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Performativity, ed. by Antonino Pennisi and Alessandra
Falzone (Cham: Springer, 2020), 243–267 (257).
  58
     Pearlman, Cutting Rhythms, xvii.


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 59
     Cf. Roger Odin, ‘Du spectateur ﬁctionalisant au nouveau spectateur: approche semio-pragmatique’, Iris,
8 (1988), 121–139 (128), and Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009) 106.
  60
     See Annabelle Cohen, ‘Film Music from the Perspective of Cognitive Science’, in The Oxford Handbook
of Film Music Studies, ed. by David Neumeyer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 96–
130, and Lars Kuchinke, Hermann Kappellhoff and Stefan Koelsch, ‘Emotion and Music in Narrative Films:
A Neuroscientific Perspective’, in The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. by Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J.
Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb and Roger A. Kendall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013),
118–138.
  61
     Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011).
  62
     Jeff Smith, ‘The Sound of Intensified Continuity’, in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics,
ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 6581–6630.
  63
     Simon Carlgren, ‘On-Beat/Off-Beat: Visual Responses to Audio-Visual Asynchrony in Music Videos’,
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 1 (2021), 28–54 (28).
  64
     Carol Vernallis, ‘The Kindest Cut: Functions and Meanings of Music Video Editing’, Screen, 42.1 (2001),
21–48 (21).
  65
     A classic test of cross-modal interference in temporal and rhythmic perception to which Fraisse refers
concerns the superimposition of a sound stimulus on an interval between visual stimuli in the so-called
‘Kappa effect’, an illusory perceptual time dilation. Fraisse, ‘Estimation and Perception of Time’, resp. 6 and
14.
  66
     See, including a general bibliography, Frank R. Schab and Robert G. Crowder, ‘Accuracy of Temporal
Coding: Auditory-visual Comparisons’, Memory & Cognition, 17.4 (1989), 384–397.
  67
     Pierre S. Zélanti and Sylvie Droit-Volet, ‘Auditory and Visual Differences in Time Perception? An
Investigation from a Developmental Perspective with Neuropsychological Tests’, Journal of Experimental
Child Psychology, 112.3 (2012), 296–311.
  68
     Fraisse, Psicologia del ritmo, 56–57.
  69
     Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 2, 170–171.
  70
     Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema (1929)’, in Selected Works, vol. 1 (London: British Film
Institute, 1988), 186ff.




96                                                               Locatelli, Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm
