Satinder Gill: Communication depends on rhythm

Satinder Gill argues that in order to witness, there has to be a connection. The notion of presence is considered in terms of one person being in the presence of another. One is aware of the other. But witnessed presence adds a dimension of how it is that you are present with another.

It’s both being perceived, whilst the other is perceiving. It is reciprocal, so not only am I witnessing but another is aware that they are being witnessed as well. As a result a connection evolves which has the potential for rhythmic coordination. If the connection isn’t already there, it will be achieved. In the act of witnessing, as Gill formulates, I am somehow connected in my body and the way I might be moving, breathing etcetera, with another human being. There is also judging happening in perceiving because there is an awareness of another’s possible intentions in the way in which they are present. And in the act of witnessing and being witnessed, necessarily a connection is being established that involves the potential and possibility of some kind of synchrony and rhythm.

In order to notice, something would have to have occurred that is not quite in sync with everything else. For example in studies looking at groups, Gill found that the moment one person’s body goes still for longer than it is supposed to go when being in flow with the rest, it becomes noticed.

That person becomes noticed. Only one person needs to notice in order for the rest of the group to suddenly become aware. Awareness here is peripheral awareness. Something is not happening as it would be, the flow has been altered, so then you notice. There is a change in spatial temporal trajectory. The moment a person notices, their body changes. As that body becomes still, the person next to this person becomes aware that there’s this stillness; they then look. And it creates an entire group awareness of this one moment that triggers noticing. So it may very well be that to witness, the person that is being witnessed has altered something in the dynamics of the special-temporal coordination of the group, of the environment. If someone or something is not working in flow, it becomes noticed. This may be a starting point when thinking about the moment that witnessing starts.

Skills for being in flow, irrespective of cultures, are learned from the moment you’re born through mother-baby coordination. The voice and the body of caretaker and child move together.

So the child begins to learn to coordinate sound and when their eyes become clearer after a few weeks, they will also be able to coordinate gesture and then coordinate gesture and sound. Human beings learn these skills through moving with others. Flow evolves from this capacity that we have as human beings, which we learn from the moment we’re born. They are survival skills, to be able to move with others. If we don’t have those survival skills, we become isolated. For example people who are autistic do not have this flow and they suffer. They have difficulties communicating and others don’t understand them. Parents are not conscious of flow. They just move with their child, as their parents did with them when they were born. And so it continues and it evolves and it changes, because culture changes and evolves, so the flow changes and evolves. Flow is perceived though nuances of vocal sound and gestural coordination. Flow is the pulsation of movement, voices and bodies. The fluidity of the possibility to understand with body and sound systems moves across boundaries and borders much more easily than the content of a speech utterance.

There is something in the space between our bodies that you can sense and feel how another person is. It may be just a slight movement, maybe they moved with their head. It may be the way their voice is projected at that moment.

So the voice is also quite material, it’s very physical. The body is not just what is inside the skin. That is why the physicality is so powerful, being in the same physical environment with another that you can feel, sense. The body is extended out of the skin; the voice is extended out of the mouth. It’s like it encompasses an entire space, like encompassing this room. It projects a whole world of things. It projects how we’re feeling, it projects how we might be thinking, it projects what we might be intending. We do so much with our bodies and our voices.

Once that space is cut off by a piece of glass, I can still see your whole body, but the body space has been cut off. There is no connection any more between the extensions of the body and the voice. There’s just this glass that’s cutting right through the entire possible space of connectivity. So it’s reduced then to what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing. That’s a reductionism. All the richness of feeling a space by being in a space and sharing a space with another is suddenly cut down to a reductionism of sound and movement. And we are more than sound and movement. Our voices are much more than that; our bodies are much more than that. This is never resolvable in a distributed setting because bodies are not physically able to intertwine and share any kind of deep tacit knowing. It is interesting to explore whether witnessing and responsibility also involve the tacit.

Screens are not permeable membranes or such. Once you detach or distance yourself from a shared physical space, human beings try to compensate for other aspects of physicality like in the current emphasis on knowledge sharing for example. When seeing you in a video link, I can project the sense of presence and feel it, but the feeling is qualitatively of a different kind because the nature of the connection is qualitatively different. I don’t know what implications this has for trust, but I know it affects rhythm. In physical space my rhythm is very subtle. The slightest nuance, I feel it, it may just be your breathing, and I feel it. Online I don’t have access to that. So there’s a whole richness of my connection with another human being, which is fragmented when I’m online. So I have to try and piece it together and use my imagination.

The notion of entrainment refers to how two clocks become synchronized when their pendulums swing differently. Eventually they will interlock and move at exactly the same time. That is Nature. So there is something in the forces that actually ends up synchronizing.

Objects synchronize when they move and so do human beings, however, human synchronization is not the same as that of the swinging pendulums. Gill describes an experiment by Himberg, at the Center for Music and Science, in which two people are asked to tap to a metronome and the results show that within a short period of time, they were synchronized with each other, although they both expressed their satisfaction about having been able to tap to the metronome. Human rhythm is not asynchronous, and the differences in our rhythmic pulse pulls us to each other and it is not operating at a conscious level. We have no idea that we are actually doing this; it’s really quite amazing. The time we are aware is when it is uncomfortable, when it is unexpected, and then it becomes conscious. Rhythm operating at the unconscious level is very hard to resist. In music research we talk about resistance to entrainment. It is rather like trying to pull away from the flow of a river. You’re pulled by it and you’re trying ‘No, no, no, no, no...!’. It’s very difficult.

Rhythm is the flow of interaction. It is a very basic coordination that is taking place at a totally unconscious level. If you’re comfortable with the way you’re walking with someone, the way you’re talking with someone, the chances are that you will be able to work well with that person. This means that whatever other actions you do take with this other person, or with the others, will be sustainable. They will be something that’s workable. It’s set on good foundations because there is a good feeling. So feeling good with others, I think, is also rooted in this notion of how rhythm and flow are working.

Being in flow with others makes it easier to act. When someone is out of flow, it is harder for this person to sense and use the possibility to act. Taking a first step is always easier if someone else is doing it as well.

You can sometimes feel immobile to do something, but you just need one other person to say ‘Hey’ and you immediately say ‘Hey...’ and you move. And you can suddenly do things you didn’t think you could do. Definitely being in flow with others helps you to achieve things and not having any flow makes it hard.

One has to be capable to adapt to different kinds of flow. Flow, which facilitates communication between different cultures, is also highly context defined. Work environments for example, have specific conventions for behavior, formats for collaboration and explicit ways of dealing with power. Therefore apprenticeship models are important when discussing learning. It teaches people how to be present in a specific environment. As long as you provide some adaptation time, people will be fine. When being in an environment and trying to adapt, whatever that is being offered in order to be part of that environment, has to be persuasive enough. But at the level of one person with another, you automatically will move with another, or you won’t. Rhythm appears to be fundamental to flow. Tuning rhythm is not something that’s controlled. If you cannot adapt to the flow and the rhythm of a specific environment, then you will not be able to succeed in that environment.

Gill tells several stories about the surprising fact that people develop a sense of ‘we’ in online environments. Such a “feeling of connectedness” in an online environment builds upon codes of conduct that have been established over time.

Shared time spent, duration of engagement, seems to be distinct for such feelings to emerge. In an online community an avatar can actually be ‘too close’, others expect response time not to be too long, and even a simple mailing list on which people (who do not know each other otherwise) post for over a year, can give a sense of “we” to the degree that people will make an effort to protect this sense of “we”. It seems that through a cognitive understanding at first, feelings emerge over time, argues Gill. There is a bridge between cognitive understanding and emergence of feelings, which functions at a very unconscious level, Gill continues. The notion that you are somehow present in presence of others seems to be fundamental. The sense of presence is very powerful in these contexts. Rhythm and synchronization apparently give a sense of flow in these environments. It remains to be seen whether this kind of shared sense of presence can be considered as acts of witnessing or not.

In face-to-face contexts transactions are emerging out of rhythm and coordination. People say that the first moment you meet someone, in those first few seconds, you begin to develop a kind of sense of how to engage.

This is before you start going into any kind of negotiation or anything like that. So it’s just the greeting itself that is powerful. The feeling if can you trust another human being is established in those first few moments. Online you don’t have that; you have to find it. So it takes longer. The establishment of trust in on- and offline contexts has different trajectories.

Focusing on this difference, the conversation between Gill and Nevejan accelerates. In online communication you have to wait for transactions and eventually you will find a way to coordinate, and trust may emerge. However, when sharing the same physical space, trust has to be achieved in order for a transaction to take place. In the real world synchronization and tuning of rhythm goes inside out. And it can be argued that in the online world trust emerges outside in, through series of transactions in which coordination (rhythm and synchronization) is found.

The moment trust comes into existence is the moment when a series of transactions become interaction; where the exchange moves from cognitive understanding to feeling. Possibly this happens when random noise turns into rhythm because when you are in rhythm with someone else, feeling emerges. However, to establish a rhythm in online environments requires a careful negotiation at first. It can be compared to ‘courting’ in a sense. In this negotiation both convention and spontaneity play a role. The online world needs duration of engagement before the advantage of a convention can be drawn upon and it doesn’t have the spontaneity of a face-to-face dialogue. It is a more fragmented world, yet people appear to be capable of establishing trust in online environments as well.
The inside-out-trust trajectory, which characterizes trust in face-to-face contexts, can be compared to music in which the rhythm is all already there and human beings try to find a common composition.
The outside-in-trust trajectory, which characterizes trust in online environments, can be compared to the hard negotiation of armies negotiating their terms of openness for survival’s sake.

In music timing is very important. If you get the rhythm right, the tune will be recognizable as long as the notes are more or less in the right place. If you focus on getting the notes right and get the rhythm wrong, nobody will recognize the melody. It will sound like noise. Notes need to be timed.

People recognize pauses in a conversation. For example we just had a pause, Gill explains, but the pause has been filled with so many thoughts and a sense that the other will eventually move or say something or will do something. So the pause has meaning for each of us in different ways. It might be said that the pause holds intentions. However, intention tends to be considered as being something formulated, as primarily cognitive. Instead, at the Center for Music and Science in the University of Cambridge, Cross has formulated the concept of ‘floating intentionality’ – here intentionality can be said to lie in how each perceives and responds to another’s gesture or vocal sound, or movement. It lies in how those involved make sense of each other. It is spontaneous, and is about sensing. In this sensing there is an essence that is true. Rhythmic interaction embodies this floating intentionality, and carries within a pause. To be able to experience the rhythm, you have to be capable to trust the anticipation. To follow a rhythm, you have to take that risk and risk does involve trust. When the beat does not come, when the rhythm fails you, then you have to readjust your expectations. The rhythm will obviously alter. It will have a break. To be able to get into rhythm of which trust will be the result, a person has to trust this rhythm in the first place.

One of the great people working on synchrony was Condon. Working in psychiatry, he understood the relationship between rhythm and health and well-being. Condon found that synchrony is fundamental for being able to trust one another.

To be able to move in synchrony is vital for physical and emotional well-being. In many cultures human beings have created shortcuts, like shaking hands or kissing on cheeks and more, to allow for the possibility to trust. If we did not have these shortcuts, human beings would be struggling to find each other and reach the synchrony that allows for a freedom of the body to relax and to be with other human beings. Not being able to be with others leads to destabilization. Rhythm affects our social capacity, to be with another, and hence our well-being, argues Gill Therefore the notion of witnessing needs to be stretched out.

At the beginning of this conversation witnessing was understood as being aware of something that has altered the flow, which makes you attend to what it is that another person is doing. Gill adds to this notion that witnessing also points to an awareness of intention. It could be that the beat, the pause has been too long. It could be that suddenly a person is absorbed in her own beat and has not said or heard a word, that they are really out of sync with the environment. This is another reason why a person is being witnessed, Gill assumes.

The spatial dimension is physical embodiment, but in the online environment we’re disembodied, time is disembodied. We can have action to feeling. But that is still not the same. So it may be that the qualities of what we achieve in an online environment are different from the qualities in a face-to-face environment.

For example, how we may share a color, how we may share a texture. A feeling about which colours look good together may be very different if we were colouring together. In online communication human beings have less access to physical exchange, but people compensate for this with the human capacity to project and attribute things that are not there. As in poetry, in online communication references to profound experience makes online experience rich as well. In online communities the awareness of a shift in rhythm or shift in intention will happen. It may just take that bit longer. In small online communities, in which people are deeply engaged, patterns are formed and it will be easier to notice changes in flow and intention than in larger communities with more players involved.
Witnessing emerges out of a break in flow or a break in awareness of intention. Until now ‘witnessing’ is formulated as taking responsibility for what happens next and having the possibility to act upon what happens next. Gill contributes to this notion that in both offline and online environments, creation and synchronization of rhythm is essential for well-being of human beings and a requirement for witnessing to take place as well.

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