A POPULAR THEORY HOLDS THAT "SWING" STEMS specifically from asynchronous timing between bass and drums in their shared articulation of the beat, a phenomenon Charles Keil has dubbed "participatory discrepancies" (PDs; Keil, 1987). The "push and pull" between these instruments purportedly generates a "productive tension" thought to drive the groove with energy. This paper presents the results of two experiments on the perception of PDs. Experiment 1 employed synthetic recordings of a conventional swing groove in which the onset asynchronies between bass and drums were varied. Participants used three listening strategies to perceive the asynchrony and its purported effects. Experiment 2 employed recordings of professional jazz musicians and tested for the effects of learning in the perception of PDs. Little evidence emerged from either experiment in support of the PD framework. An alternative proposal drawn from metric entrainment theory explains the effects of PDs as more limited and local than previously thought.

In jazz, the function of durational inequality at the eighth-note level is the production of anacrusis on the offbeats, thereby generating the sense of forward propulsion and drive thought to typify the rhythmic quality known as "swing." The common use of relatively "straight" eighth notes by improvising soloists helps to sustain forward momentum, whereas the less even, triplet-like "swing" eighth notes used more frequently by drummers facilitate the perception of a quarter-note beat. Varying the Beat-Upbeat Ratio (BUR)-i.e., moving between straight and swing eighth notes-enables jazz musicians to manipulate the flow of motional energy across a phrase in systematic ways in conjunction with other melodic processes. Analyses of melodic phrases by John Coltrane, Lee Konitz, and Sonny Clark reveal the centrality of such aspects of microrhythmic expression to the affective power of jazz improvisation.

Background Loss of expression of fragile gene products, Fhit and Wwox, occurs in many cancer types, with loss exhibited early in the neoplastic process in some. Wwox has been understudied in pancreatobiliary cancers, especially in relation to other involved tumor suppressors. We have assessed the status of the Fhit and Wwox proteins encoded by DNA damage susceptible chromosome fragile sites encompassed by FHIT and WWOX tumor suppressor genes. Methods Pancreatic, gallbladder and ampullary cancers, normal pancreas, chronic pancreatitis, and benign gall-bladder specimens were stained for expression of Fhit, Fhit effector protein Fdxr, Wwox, and other tumor suppressors by immunohistochemistry, and comparisons were made between benign and malignant tissue. Correlations of expression among proteins and clinicopathologic features were sought using Spearman’s rank order. Survival curves were created using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared by log-rank analysis. Predictors of survival were determined using multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis. Results Fhit and Wwox were ubiquitously expressed in benign samples and significantly and coordinately reduced in pancreatic, gallbladder, and ampullary cancers. In pancreatic cancers, Fdxr expression was positively correlated with Fhit and Wwox expression. Neither Fhit nor Wwox expression correlated with expression of other tumor suppressors or with clinicopathologic characteristics measured. Conclusion Loss of Fhit and Wwox expression does not predict tumor progression or patient survival, suggesting that loss of expression of genes at the exquisitely replication stress sensitive chromosome fragile regions is an early event in the pathogenesis of cancers of the gallbladder, pancreas, and ampulla.

A piece of music presupposes, even before the attempt to create a shape in time, a step back, away from the stuff, so that its substance is clearly distinguished from my own mood, phantasy, feeling, activity. The ultimate problem of the musical work of art lies toward the negative side of autonomy, toward distance and isolation. It is not so much to free music from words, representation, or function, as to free it from ourselves, to externalize it. The musical object must not only be made whole, but also given body, located at a distance and kept there. It must be ‘spatialized’, so to speak. The problem of musical form conceived as a piece is the making of the musical thing. (Patricia Carpenter, ‘The Musical Object’, 1967)

In 1966, Charles Keil introduced the term “engendered feeling” to capture a crucial aspect of jazz performance practice, that certain something beyond notation that performers add to music to make it “swing.” Engendered feeling subsumes the sense of rhythmic propulsion that Andre Hodeir once referred to as “vital drive,” the impulse that makes music come alive and induces listeners to movement. It stems, Keil insisted, not from syntactical processes that can be represented in common musical notation, but from musicians’ use of expressive microtiming at the sub-syntactical level in sustaining a rhythmic groove, a phenomenon he later dubbed “participatory discrepancies.” Research on expressive microtiming in jazz and other groove-based musics has largely followed suit and neglected the relevance of syntactical pattern for the production of engendered feeling. By contrast, I propose that engendered feeling arises from the systematic interaction of participatory discrepancies with aspects of syntactical pattern. Supplementing Christopher Hasty’s theory of metric projection with empirical research on expressive microtiming, I show how participatory discrepancies, operating at the sub-syntactical level, condition the way we experience rhythmic grooves at the syntactical level specifically through the operation of anacrusis at multiple levels of rhythmic structure, for it is the strategic manipulation of anacrusis that drives an effective groove. Analysis of the ride rhythm in jazz, the basic rock drumbeat, and the groove pattern of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” illustrate how variations in timing serve either to enhance or attenuate the affective power of anacrusis, leading to subtle differences in engendered feeling.