Rhythmic synchrony and mediated interaction: towards a framework of rhythm in embodied interaction

The role of rhythm in facilitating sense-making in human communication lies in prior research findings that information transfer is managed with prosodic and rhythmically synchronized movements of body and voice. A particular focus is on pragmatic information.

Pragmatic information in this context denotes how we let each other know how we are understanding each other. In speech, for example, we do this through the feedback we give each other, and one form of this are backchannels (uh huh, ok, so, right, um). The linguistic equivalent in the body is through movements such as head nods, and other body movements. In this research, synchrony and rhythm of body and voice are seen to facilitate the mutuality of immediate social interaction and are considered to be a fundamental dimension of social presence. The immediacy and mutuality of embodied face-to-face interaction is regarded as the base for understanding how we sense and time our coordinations with each other. Rhythm in gesture coordination and prosody allows people to attune to each other, interpret significances and make manifest their intentions as part of the context rather than the substance of the information interchange. From music, the concept of ‘floating intentionality’ (Cross 2008) brings together the idea of the mutual manifestation of intention in language (Sperber and Wilson 1986) with intentionality from a musical context and is of interest to this research. The findings from neuroscience on rhythm and entrainment (music and neuroscience), and of self with other self (mirror neurons), provide support for interpersonal synchrony that is studied using experimental and observation techniques within various disciplines, most significantly music psychology, psycholinguistics and social psychology, kinesics, gesture, and interaction analysis.

Our everyday communications with people with whom we work, love, and share friendship is increasingly distributed in time and place, even when sharing a geographical locale. This necessitates that we constantly move within mixed realities shifting between face-to-face and online interactions (e.g. email, facebook, skype), whether sharing an office, a classroom, and a home. Communicating via screens, often with delays and disruptions in audio and video channels and email, means that we have to adapt to these conditions that differ from the experience of sharing our physical body space. The increasing use of social networking sites and video chat software shows that we do find ways to adapt, as it affords us some capacity to move in time with one another or speak in time with each other at an affordable level. And it is this dimension of moving in time, of mutual adaptation, that is the concern of this paper, specifically the effect this has on how we engage and make sense of each other, and thereby transfer information.

We know that the probability and speed of response in communication vary with it being mediated or direct (Bavelas 2007). In face-to-face dialogue, responses are highly probable and fast. Frame-by-frame micro-analysis reveals that listeners often provide simultaneous feedback to the speaker (Condon 1967; Bavelas et al. 2000), for example, by nodding and facial expressions. Indeed such responses are demonstratively essential to the speaker in the face-to-face situation, whose narrative falters when they are absent (Bavelas et al. ibid). We sense and time our coordinations in the immediacy and mutuality of embodied face-to-face interaction, and this is highly ‘naked’ (Goffman 1963) sensing and monitoring.

When this sensing is comfortable, we move well together, we are in synchrony with each other. Being able to move in time with another person occurs at multiple levels, and research shows this occurring in the utterances of timed syllables in speech, the pulse of a pause and breath, and synchronized swaying, up to the pragmatic levels of rhythm that express how we are making sense of each other, to each other. Mounting evidence that rhythmic synchrony is fundamental to human sociality (Miles et al. 2009; Rabinowitch et al. 2011; Himberg 2011; Gill 2007) necessitates that we understand how rhythmic synchrony operates in face-to-face co-presence as a basis for guaging the similarities, differences, and changes in rhythmic synchrony in distributed settings and their impacts on us as social beings.

Moving in synchrony with another person involves mutual awareness. As long ago as 1963, the sociologist Goffman spoke of the ‘special mutuality of immediate social interaction’ from a linguistic perspective; we will always ‘sympathetically take the attitudes of others’ in our presence. (p. 16). Goffman described the ‘full conditions’ of co-presence as being about sensing: ‘persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experience of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived.’ (p. 17). Furthermore, ‘[social] situations begin when [this] mutual monitoring begins, and lapse when the second-last person has left.’ (p. 18).

This ‘sensing’ between self and other in the mutuality of immediate social interaction is explored in this paper as being realized in synchrony and rhythm. Such sensing is considered as being a fundamental dimension of social presence and to witnessing. Witnessing is meant here in the sense of having knowledge and understanding within the communicative situation and embodies the responsibility necessary for mutual interaction. Each of us has an internal rhythm (e.g. heartbeat, breathing), and when we become aware of another person, in order to interact, our rhythms need to synchronize, and whilst we synchronize, we can become entrained. Entrainment denotes how we mutually adapt to each other’s rhythmic beat (Hall 1983; Himberg 2011). Human sense-making is thereby considered as being a process of mutual adaptation that is rhythmic in quality.

Research suggests that synchronizing with others may be fundamental to human survival (Cross 2006; Arom 1991; Hall 1983) and that we learn this capacity through motherese, mother–baby talk (Condon and Sander 1974; Malloch and Trevarthen 2009; Miall and Dissanayake 2003). Humans are able to achieve heightened moments of connection with each other expressed in rhythmic simultaneous synchrony (Condon 1970; Gill 2002), where they can share a tacit level of understanding (Gill 2004).

Synchronizing with others facilitates emotional well-being and empathy (Rabinowitch et al. 2011), which suggests that emotional well-being is part of human survival. Condon suggested that synchrony facilitates the basic human need in communication to avoid loss and to release inner tension. In an interview with Boston University Radio in 1970, he describes how the conventions of greetings in everyday conversation allow us to achieve this efficiently in a very brief time frame with recognizable phrasing and rhythm.

In order to develop a conceptual framework for rhythm in embodied interaction, the paper explores a terrain of work that can inform this. This includes notions of rhythmic synchrony in pragmatics, embodied interaction in time, rhythm in presence, intra- and interpersonal synchrony, and entrainment. The paper is divided into thematic sections. Pragmatics and Rhythmic Synchrony discusses the emergence of the relation between rhythm in music and language. Time in Embodied Interaction explores the three inter-related notions of entrainment (mutual adaptation), synchrony (moving together simultaneously) and rhythm (flow, a form of entrainment), drawing on analyses of time in social and musical interaction. Survival explores research on the proto-musicality of rhythm in interpersonal encounters and group synchrony. Rhythm draws together concepts around rhythm that inform on the nature of presence, of witnessing and being witnessed. Synchrony , which focuses on intra- and interpersonal synchrony, considers its effects on physical and emotional well-being and explores synchrony from music psychology, kinesics (body movement), and phonetics. Entrainment explores everyday mutual synchronization and entrainment behaviours, drawing upon research in interpersonal interaction and how it extends the model of entrainment formed in ethnomusicology, touching on research in music in cognition, and attentional dynamics. The subsection on Neuroscience and entrainment considers work in neuroscience on rhythm and entrainment with regard to the relationship of body to sound and empathy. This includes mirror neurons, the neurobiology of rhythmic motor entrainment, and music and neuroscience. Although neuroscientific work in interpersonal synchrony is just forming, this work that has been done provides useful information about human synchrony and perception of sound at the neural level.

The interest in relating prosody (the patterns of vocalization) to body movement arose from the author’s work in Japan with researchers working on Aizuchi (backchannels) in speech at NTT and ATR for the design of multi-modal interfaces. It was possible to feel the intent in the prosodic qualities of the backchannels and fillers that the Japanese researchers were defining and codifying. The author drew upon (1) this work on backchannels and fillers (Shimojima et al. 1998; Kawamori et al. 1995, 1998) and (2) conversation moves which express how people are understanding what each other are saying, and (3) research on gesture, to reflect on how our bodies mediate knowledge transfer when we communicate. The first study analysed how landscape architects’ bodies mediate knowledge whilst they are sketching a design together. What emerged was a coding system for pragmatic acts of body movement with speech, termed Body Moves, which were identified as having a rhythmic quality.

These salient rhythms could not be fully explained through the conversational feedback model of turn taking in conversation moves and speech backchannels. One of these in particular (Gill et al. 2000) posed a difficulty in using the idea of feedback as it involved both the bodies of the participants moving at exactly the same time and also in time with the voice of one of them. This was called the parallel coordinated move as the bodies were performing different tasks, so they were not imitating each other. This movement that lasted 2 s could be said to be equivalent to the experience of musicians playing together in ‘unison’ (Levinson 2011).

A further sketching study was undertaken to test the existence of these Body Moves (Gill and Borchers 2004). This time participants (undergraduates at Stanford University) working in pairs drew upon a computer-based interface that permitted only one person to touch the surface at a time (SmartBoard). This was expected to block the moment of ‘unison’. Indeed, the parallel coordinated move was inhibited but so was all rhythmic interpersonal synchrony around the surface of the board. This finding suggested that there is a relationship between the various levels and forms of rhythmic and synchronous coordination that needs further investigation.

The other study mentioned above, of non-face-to-face interaction, that compared Japanese and English speakers, gives support to this suggestion of a multi-level framework. The study involved pairs of Japanese participants speaking in Japanese and English participants speaking in English, located in separate rooms and talking through a microphone. The study found that the body movements of each participant are finally tuned to the other’s voice and to their own when they speak. For the Japanese, the movements were predominantly head-nodding actions, and for the British, they involved a variety of body movements including shoulder movements, body sway, and head movements. The study also showed that these rhythms are aligned with the language spoken and that they differ between the two languages. Kita and Ide’s (2007) analysis of Japanese aizuchi (akin to backchannels but occurring on the part of the speaker as well as listener) proposes that any cultural comparison needs to understand how culture itself shapes the patterns of synchronization, and they provide examples that illustrate the need to go beyond the traditional feedback model. A surprising finding in the non-face-to-face condition is that body movements can occur simultaneously in both participants, and this may occur without speech. These occurrences are not arbitrary. The fine tuning of body movement with self and other speech indicates that these movements are for the maintenance of self-synchrony that is needed in order to be synchronized with the other person. Condon and Ogston (1966, 1974) provide detailed evidence for the relation of self (intra)-synchrony with interpersonal synchrony, for human entrainment in the face-to-face condition. And as indicated in Kita et al. (2007) study, cultural differences are key here.

The findings about patterns of synchrony and rhythm from both the studies of collaborative sketching activity and the non-face-to-face communication of Japanese and English speakers suggest a complex picture of movement at multiple levels. It is not clear how a particular level is working with another. Furthermore, Body Moves (pragmatic rhythms) occurred in both face-to-face and non-face-to-face communication but not in the same way, and it is expected that the speech-mediated rhythms may also differ in the face-to-face condition with its visual information of gesture and body movement.

Some further explanation is needed for Body Moves. As mentioned, these are pragmatic rhythms (Gill et al. 2000; Gill 2007) and express transitional moments in body and speech sound movement patterns, where the participants’ movements become coupled. This coupling is considered to be part of the process of understanding each other.

The rhythmic quality of body moves can be understood with the example of everyday greetings. We shake hands, hug each other, kiss on cheeks, etc. Greetings are highly culturally variable (Duranti 1997; Mallery 1891): Maori rub noses, Russians kiss on the mouth, and Japanese bow. But universally, irrespective of culture, these bodily acts are about gauging one person’s sense of another. Greetings are essential to giving us a chance to trust in the communication that will unfold and afford us time to achieve the possibility of mutual synchrony later in that unfolding (Condon et al. 1970). The greeting is a parallel coordinated act, and the mutual synchrony of body and voice in greetings expresses ‘a commitment to communicate’ that may be likened to a form of phatic communion (Malinowski 1923) for social bonding.

Body Moves seem to be salient ‘phenomenal beats’ that have phenomenological experience already embodied (Tolbert (2001). In their pragmatic function, Body Moves express how each person is perceiving and understanding the other, i.e. sense-making. They are expressions of mutually manifest intentions to understand the other (Sperber and Wilson 1986), sensed in the relation between each others’ movements. Intentional lies in how each perceives and responds to another’s gesture or vocal sound, or movement. This sensing of intention is spontaneous, and within the act of sensing is an essence that is true.

In their entraining function that pulls the attention of one to the other, Body Moves serve to sustain our commitment to engage with each other, to transform our states of tacit knowing such that we are able to arrive at understandings. They may be considered to be a form of social entrainment (Phillips-Silver et al. 2010) and are moments of empathic connection akin to heightened emotional accents in music (Gill 2007). They culminate in a crescendo of which the ultimate peak is a moment of simultaneous mutual synchrony (parallel coordinated move).

The rhythmic coupling in Body Moves seems to be akin to music performance. In a choir, for example, singers and musicians are ‘collectively engaged in the synchronous production and perception of complex patterns of sound and music’ (Cross 2006; Arom 1991; Blacking 1973). In collective musical behaviour, performers are likely to be coordinated with time and be more or less predictable in relation to each other. This collective activity has a high degree of coherence which is likely to help establish a strong sense of group identity (Stobart and Cross 2000; Cross 2006).

Researchers such as Kendon (1972, 1983) have noted the centrality of rhythm or flow in gesture and prosody that allows people to attune to each other, interpret significances, and make manifest their intentions as part of the context rather than the substance of the information interchange. Such features of gesture and sound in communicative interaction have been explored as manifestations of a human capacity to entrain, that is, to align the timings of acts, sound, and attention in communicative contexts around a regular but implicit periodic time interval. Entrainment may be evident momentarily, as in the alignment of the timing of gesture and body movement that has been observed as co-occurring with topical agreement in discourse (e.g. Kendon 1972, 1990; Gill et al. 2000), or it may take more sustained forms, being manifested over longer stretches of discursive interaction (e.g. syllables, Wilson and Wilson 2005; body sway, Shockley et al. 2003; eye gaze, Richardson and Dale 2005).

In the field of music psychology, Cross’s works on music and sociality (Cross and Woodruff 2009; Cross 2006), music and evolution (Cross 2006), and music perception propose that music is fundamentally social and bodily and that the relation between music and movement in time is evolutionary and cognitive. This relation shapes our capacity to both perceive and anticipate when an event, be this a gesture or vocalization, is going to occur, and to mutually respond to it in coordinated time. Cross has developed the concept of ‘floating intentionality’, which brings together the idea of shared intentionality from pragmatics in language (Sperber and Wilson 1986) and intentionality from a musical context that is intrinsic to both these domains. He makes the distinction that language is primarily transactional and music relational (Cross 2011). Rhythm operates at the relational level in both language and music.

Linguistic models focus primarily on turn-taking structures that can be considered outside the dynamics of experiencing in time. Recently, Levinson (2011), director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, has begun to build a bridge between music and language that considers the temporal dynamics of the turn-taking structure as possibly facilitating the rhythmicity in speech. Furthermore work in phonetics by Local (2003, 2007) shows how qualities in vocal sounds of participants are taken up by each other, whereby pitch, tempo, melody, function to bind turn-taking dynamics. There are new possibilities emerging for exploring the relation between rhythm in music and language.

The author’s research extends from and builds upon the work on Body Moves to ask the wider question about the role that rhythm plays in facilitating communication and tacit knowing. The research now draws on music psychology, particularly the research of the Centre for Music and Science (CMS), University of Cambridge. The work also draws on the emerging research in psycholinguistics and phonetics. The aim is to deepen the investigation of rhythm in sense-making. Further analysis of the relation between levels of rhythm and synchrony, and identifying the differences between being able to see the other person or being unable to see them, is currently being undertaken in a project on the pragmatics of rhythm in language and music with Tommi Himberg, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Himberg has researched entrainment as mutual adaptation in human interaction (Himberg 2011) and analysed synchronization of movement in cross-cultural interaction (Himberg and Thompson 2010). The project compares music and language improvisation tasks to understand the qualities of rhythm and why the pragmatic patterns emerge when they do. The author is also conducting research on entrainment and rhythm in phatic interaction within the human greeting, in collaboration with Guy Hayward at the Centre for Music and Science [CMS]. Another project called Touching Sound aims to design a computer-based musical instrument for therapy that can facilitate synchrony and entrainment in human interaction whilst also giving aesthetic pleasure. This is a collaboration with Hoadley (musician and designer of the instrument) and Odell-Miller (music therapist) at Anglia Ruskin University, Himberg, Kempske (sculpture artist specializing on touch), Cambridge, Magee (music therapist specializing in neural disorders and motor rehabilitation), and the Centre for Music and Science.

In this paper, we are focusing on an analysis of time in social interaction and musical interaction and addressing how rhythm and synchrony are considered in music and in human conversation. For example, if we take the idea of periodicity or pulse, in music, this needs to be continuous throughout a musical piece or performance; however, in linguistic interactions, this occurs at various levels: some over more extended periods such as a continuous stream of speech that may be broken by pauses, hesitations, and interjections, and others for moments in the interaction.

On entrainment, Bispham (2006) explores in detail whether one can talk about entrainment in the same way in linguistic and musical performance. He cites Patel and Daniele (2003) that ‘… correlations between aspects of temporal structuring in music and language suggest some overlap in the mechanisms employed’ (Ibid.129) and postulates from this that we can consider
(a) interpersonal entrainment as being the key rhythmic feature in human interaction ranging from a ‘loose subconscious use of pulse as a framework for interpersonal/turn-taking interactions as in mother–infant talk and linguistic interactions’ to a more strict adherence to pulse (groove) in group behaviour and synchronicity of output, to maintain temporal stability and group coordination, in music and dance, and
(b) that the ‘appearance of pulse in non-musical interaction does not depend on entrainment mechanisms similar to those employed in music, and is the result of organizing actions in relation to short-term and constantly interrupted pulses and expectancies based on temporal cues and experience.’

Both possible perspectives embody differing conceptions of entrainment held within them and differing perceptions of human interaction. In distinguishing ‘pulse’ in music and language, Bispham (Ibid.) says that ‘attentional pulse is a well-modelled and widely accepted feature of temporal perception in which perceived regularities build expectations as to the timing of future events (Jones 1976). Musical pulse, however, would appear to be distinct in that it is maintained over time and is perceived unambiguously, or at related hierarchical levels (London 2004), by enculturated individuals (Stobart and Cross 2000).

Language invariably embodies ambiguity, giving rise to the need for trust, emotional well-being, desire to connect with others, and trying to make sense of a communicative situation. Yet in both language and music, we build expectations about the timing of what will be said or happen next based on past regularities, albeit with constant adjustments that are ideally made mutually when there is trust. The difference lies in the nature of the regularity of the shared pulse that we are attending to. The following explains how pulse is achieved in music.

Music pulse is achieved by synchronizing motor (physical) action, which music psychologists term ‘sensory motor synchronization’ (SMS). In order to be able to sustain this in any performance, they have found that there are ‘correcting’ mechanisms (Repp 2005) that help in keeping in time together or even in keeping in time to moving to music. These findings have come from experiments that involve participants tapping one finger (normally the index finger) to music or beats that are played to them, or tapping with other participants to such stimuli (refs). ‘Errors’ arise from the periodic timings of our motor capacities (our finger movements) when we tap to regular sound stimuli. Error correction appears to be an inbuilt natural capacity that we have in order to keep in time. Without it, the variability in our periodic motor movements would accumulate with the probability of large asynchronies occurring (Repp Op cit. p. 976).

Error correction is a process that is linked to the cognitivist view of timekeeping that involves internal clocks, most notably the Wing and Kristofferson (1973) and the Vorberg and Schulze (2002). Much of the tapping literature, including the work by Repp, is related to these models.

These models assume that there is an internal clock somewhere in the brain that produces steady intervals and allows us to tap regular intervals, either when synchronizing to a metronome or when continuing the isochronous beat after the metronome fades out. The mechanism has sources of noise (usually motor noise, e.g. the movement of the finger as cited above) and so a timing error creeps up, and unless there is an error correction mechanism, the error grows and timekeeping fails. The error correction mechanism in these two cases simply takes the perceived asynchrony in the previous beat, adds the interval that the internal clock produces, adds or subtracts a little bit, depending on whether the previous tap was early or late and then executes the next tap, etc. The phase error correction (if one beat is slightly misaligned) is thought to be subconscious and automatic (Stephan et al. 2002), whilst period error correction (tempo changes to faster or slower) requires conscious control.

Bispham describes interacting phase and period error correction mechanisms as forming the basic temporal framework for real-time interpersonal musical behaviours. (Op. cit. p. 130) Thaut (2005) writing on rhythm, music, and the brain argues that period is a key concept in timekeeping and that periodicity and the ability to adjust the period are central for interaction.

However, current phase error correction models pose a problem as they do not seem to work for situations where there are two, mutually adapting agents as in Himberg experiments (2011). This may be because they are simple descriptions of what goes on when an individual adjusts to a metronome and do not extend beyond that to the mutual, real-time adaptation and communication process with its complex dynamics, information, and emotion. In principle, the phase error correction/period error correction models that have been postulated for human timekeeping and synchronization should apply for two person interaction, but tests by Himberg show that more work needs to be done to improve them for them to work.

The dynamic systems models, the coupled oscillator models that Shockley et al. (1983), Marsh et al. (2009), and others have applied to entrainment capture the process of interpersonal synchrony much better. The dynamic systems model is not concerned with phase correction or period correction, as it does not deal with the constant adjustment of individual tap timings, but rather with interaction and the constant push and pull between the ‘oscillators’ (people). Most importantly, it seems that dynamic systems theories and models are able to handle verbal, non-verbal, musical performance, and dance, equally well, and they work with continuous data as well as discrete data, handling the great changes of pace, differing periodicities, and metrical levels that are present in real interactions.

Error correction has been considered outside of music psychology, in the study of everyday conversations and interactions with others, where we self-correct to be in time with others by gauging the intervals. Conversation analysts speak of ‘self-repair’ (Good 1990) as being essential to the maintenance of the ‘turn’. Edward T Hall (1983) drew upon the feedback metaphor to speak about knowing the proper interval for corrective action as the feedback rhythm. However, there is little work on error correction as a rhythmic property in human interaction and the dynamic systems model provides a more appropriate analysis of timekeeping in human engagement.

In addition to the discussion on error correction, the production or perception of a musical pulse also involves engagement of the physiological and motor system.

Rhythmic sound has been used in a range of therapeutic contexts with individuals with movement disabilities, e.g. Parkinsons’ disease (Unkefer and Thaut 2002). The Institute for Music and Neurology (Beth Abraham Hospital, New York) has been developing therapeutic techniques around rhythmic cueing to support motor rehabilitation, as has the Centre for Biomedical Research in Music (University of Colarado). Extensive studies with infants and adults show that periodic music/sound rhythmic stimuli create movement patterns (Winkler et al. 2009; Zentner and Eerola 2010). A sleeping 6-day-old baby is shown to respond at a neurological level, to the missing beat in a musical phrase (Winkler et al. Ibid), and a 6-month-old child who is sitting still on his mother’s lap suddenly starts moving and swinging its legs and body to a rhythmic phrase in a musical piece and stops when the phrase stops (Zentner et al. Ibid).

In language, we also experience movements in our body both whilst producing speech and whilst perceiving/responding to speech. Bavelas et al. (2000) suggest that a speaker cannot speak if there is no physical response from a listener, and non-face-to-face interaction analyses show that we need to move as we speak in order to speak. This suggests that our production and perception of sound, be it in music or language, are intrinsically bound with the physiological and motor system. Periodic rhythmic stimulus affords a degree of enhanced control of movement, and research shows that rhythm and movement are bound together in infancy (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009; 1974, Stern 1974; Condon and Sander 1974). Mother–baby interactions have been described as rhythmically synchronized and musical, with the proposal that such rhythmical synchrony is important for companionship, intersubjectivity, and empathy. Moving our bodies and voices together in time embodies a potent pragmatic purpose, that of being together. This is imbued in us from the moment we are born, evidenced in these studies of the proto-musicality of mother–infant communication.

Recent research has also shown that there are significant emotional (Rabinowitch et al. 2011; Swaine 2004), cognitive (Richardson et al. 2007; Shockley et al. 2003; Macrae et al. 2008), and social (Gill et al. 2000; Kirschner and Tomasello 2009, 2010) effects of moving together in time.

Moving in time, for example in chanting, facilitates positive emotional states (Swaine 2004), and research on improvisation with young children (Rabinowitch et al. 2011) shows how when they move in time, and this facilitates their positive feelings towards each other. Work on memory shows that mutual synchrony has an impact on memory for aspects of people we are communicatively engaged with (Macrae et al. 2008; Woolhouse and Tidhar 2010). And at the social level, our capacity to share goals with those we are communicating with involves rhythmic mutual synchrony. Kirschner and Tomasello (2009, 2010) show that when children as young as two and half years old move to an external audio beat that is produced by another human, e.g. when they are drumming with another person, they are socially motivated to joint, entrained, movement. Entrainment facilitates social bonding.

Research on rhythm in both music and language supports Bispham’s finding that rhythm in music consists of a constellation of partially shared and partially specific abilities with rhythm in language and his proposal that the study of rhythm needs to be positioned within a wider framework of human cognition and behaviour. The discussion in this paper seeks to develop this wider framework of rhythm in embodied interaction.

Interpersonal synchrony is skill for being in flow and is evidently learned from birth, through ‘motherese’ (Condon et al. 1974; Miall et al. 2003; Malloch and Trevarthen 2009). The voice and body of caretaker and child move together. It has been suggested that this capacity to rhythmically synchronize is developed before birth whilst in the womb with the myelination of the auditory nerve at 6 months old, enabling us to hear in the womb (Hall p. 177).

As adults, we have developed the ability to move in time with others and to express pragmatic meaning in time with others, where we seek information, clarity about what the other might mean, clarifying to the other our meaning, agreeing with the other, and expressing understanding. These pragmatic rhythms have been described as Body Moves (Gill et al. 2000) and as being culturally rooted. The origins of this cultural embodiment is suggested as being shaped in motherese and developed further in childhood thoughts and behaviours.

Miall and Dissanayake (2003) describe how the ‘poetic’ sounds/rhythms of a mother’s utterances and bodily engagement differ from ordinary adult interaction by being simplified, rhythmically repeated, exaggerated and elaborated to phonetically attract and sustain the baby’s attention. Using phonetic foregrounding, the mother expresses ‘patterns of intimacy and observation, empathy and commentary’. The aesthetics in this poetic engagement facilitates emotional attachment. Miall et al. propose that evidence of the sensitivity of infants as young as 6–8 weeks old to indications (vocal, visual, and Kinesic) of social contingency of carers is evidence of design in neural organization. They argue that this supports the view that mutuality or intersubjectivity, defined as the coordinating of behavioural–emotional states with another’s in temporally organized sequences, is a primary human psychobiological endowment. Disorders of emotion and learning in early childhood are traceable to faults in early brain growth of neural systems underlying this capacity (Travarthen and Aitken 1994; Trevarthen and Daniel 2005).

This proto-musicality seems to hold the key to understanding the fundamental qualities of intersubjectivity and formation of cultural rhythms. The infant learns to move with the speech structure of culture and sociobiological entrainment processes (Condon and Sander 1974) essential to its social survival. Which rhythm one performs as an adult is a function of the culture of the people who are around when these patterns are being learned. In his extensive study of generations of minorities in New York city, Efron (1972) identified the gesture trace of culture through the generations. The gesture trace is likely to have a recognizable rhythm.

Human behaviour is dominated by ‘complex hierarchies of interlocking rhythms’, and in studies undertaken by Hall and his students (see Hall 1983) such interlocking rhythms have been likened to a symphonic score. These rhythms, he suggests, hold the key to the interpersonal processes between ‘mates, co-workers, and organizations of all types on the interpersonal level and across cultural boundaries’. Rhythms express the truth of interpersonal encounters.

Even how close we stand with each other is expressed in rhythm, notable when adjusting to cultural difference. Hall called this the proxemic dance (Op cit. p. 154). A study of conversing ‘Americans and Mediterranean peoples’ discovered that distances were maintained with accuracy to ‘a fraction of an inch’, and the process was rhythmic. People adjusted their distances approximately every thirty seconds. In studies on group synchrony, one of Hall’s students found that children in a playground were all playing in synchrony with each other. On close scrutiny, it emerged that one active girl was skipping and dancing all around the playground, and whenever she came near a cluster of children, they would synchronize to her. This girl was ‘orchestrating’ the movements of the playground.

These examples illustrate how much rhythm is part of our co-existence and survival as growing children and as adults. If we do not have this survival skill, we become isolated. Hall proposed that depression may have its roots in the person who is out of sync in deep and basic ways. People who are autistic, for example, do not have this flow, and they suffer as do their carers. They have difficulties communicating and others do not understand them. In their work, Condon and Ogston (1966) looked for current and predictable regularities in ‘normal’ behaviour and compared these with those of ‘pathological’ behaviours, including aphasia and schizophrenia and autism. At the heart of these regularities is the relationship between self-synchrony and self-with-other synchrony (intra- and inter-personal synchrony). Self-synchrony of body parts in the speaker with variations in their speech utterances normally takes one twenty-fourth to two twenty-fourths of a second at any time, and it is reflected in synchrony on the part of the listener at the very same time although not of the same body parts (Ibid. p. 457). In pathologies, there is reduced self-synchrony of body parts with speech utterances, and delays in auditory perception (delayed auditory feedback) create disturbance and difficulty for self-synchrony and in turn for interpersonal synchrony. The relation between intra- and inter-personal synchrony is fundamental to mutual awareness and entrainment.

Entrainment may be a key contributor to the survival of the species, and this seems to be supported by the findings of motherese. ‘By the time a child begins to speak they will have already laid down within their self the form and structure of the language and interaction system of their culture’ (Condon and Sander 1974), that will shape their survival path.

The differences in our rhythmic pulse pull us to each other. This pulling is not operating at a conscious level.

In a study by Himberg (2011) of dyads tapping to a metronome, he discovered that they drift away from the metronome as they are pulled to each other’s beat, and come back to the metronome as a reference point, and drift away towards each other again. When asked how they kept time to the metronome, the subjects reported that it was easy to keep time to the metronome. They had no awareness that most of the time they were not keeping time with it.

The time we are aware of that we are pulled to another person’s rhythm 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, this is described as ‘resistance’ to entrain. In the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Afro-Brazilian Congado communities hold spiritual rituals, where each group moves through the town performing distinct songs and rhythms simultaneously. This involves the periodic repetition of chants, rhythmic patterns, and bodily movements. When these groups meet or pass close by each other, they greet each other whilst making rhythms and singing, with the focus of each group on staying together and not being rhythmically influenced by the other group, thereby resisting entrainment. This focus is linked to their own sense of group identity in the ritual context (Lucas 2009).

Rhythm is the flow of interaction. If you are comfortable with the way you are walking with someone, or talking or breathing with someone, the relationship is set on good foundations because there is a good feeling and whatever other actions you take with this person will be sustainable. Hall said that general people do not sync well with people they do not like and they do with those they love. Feeling good with others is also rooted in this notion of how rhythm and flow work.

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. This could also be said of speaking a new language. If you can get the intonation more or less as it is expected to be and can time your gestures accordingly and in time with the native speaker, you can manage to receive the commitment to be understood whilst using imperfect words.

This may be because rhythm enables anticipation and flow, which seems to be part of sense-making. Rhythm carries within it the intent of the interaction. Conventionally, intention tends to be considered as being something formulated, as primarily cognitive. For everyday sense-making, and for the case above, of speaking a new language, the concept of ‘floating intentionality’ (Cross 2008) better captures the sense in which we grasp another’s intention through our own response to it. It is suggested that rhythmic interaction embodies this floating intentionality and even carries it within a pause. To be able to experience the rhythm, you need to trust the anticipation. To follow a rhythm, you have to take that risk and risk does involve trust in the expected time intervals. When the beat does not come in expected time, then you have to readjust your expectations for the next beat. The rhythm will obviously alter. Meyer’s (1956) theory on music and emotion shows that the manipulation of rhythm has an emotional affect: a composer can manipulate the listener’s emotions by setting up expectations and then delay their fulfilment or not fulfil them at all, thus causing an emotional reaction from the listener. In human interaction, to enter a rhythm that carries trust, a person has to trust in the rhythm in the first place, be this musical interpersonal interaction as in Jazz improvisation and linguistic interpersonal interaction.

In his work on the fundamental properties of meaning in musical and linguistic interaction, Cross (2011) proposes that music is primarily relational, and language primarily transactional. However, common to both music and language is rhythm in the movement of the body and voice/musical sound that is considered here as occurring at the relational level. Floating intentionality works at the relational level of human sense-making.

George Leonard (1981) writes about identity as being ‘the stable, persistent, unique quality that manifests in every human individual’. Personal identity in the form of a ‘distinctive pulse’ can persist over time, through generations, and evolving culture. Leonard speculated that all significant bodily and behavioural functions when subjected to adequate analysis will be shown to display unique, identifiable rhythmic patterns, the sum of which can be taken as an overall wave function, the most fundamental quality of individuality.

An individual’s rhythmic patterns are situated in the rhythm of the culture(s) they are rooted in. Hall (1976) found that each culture he investigated had its own beat, tempo, and rhythm. Furthermore, that the behaviours of people embodied the culturally based intervals for corrective action that affect how we connect at the emotional level. For example, the Spanish of New Mexico keep close tabs on each other’s emotions so that even slight variations are immediately detected and commented on. This short interval or short cycle on feedback can create volatility. Anglo-Saxons have a long time interval, long feedback cycle, taking mood shifts for granted and avoiding interfering or intervening in others lives. People frequently feel they are alone and that it is right and proper they should be able to solve their own problems. When things go wrong, it only becomes obvious when it is out of hand.

Rhythm is a powerful dimension of identity and culture. The proxemics example of people adjusting a fraction of an inch at a time to cultural differences in proximity whilst moving every thirty seconds around a room as they are standing and talking not only illustrates the power of interpersonal synchrony but also shows what happens when this lacks mutual adaptation of the cultural embodiment of space. Hall found that few people can function unless it is within the limits of their own rhythm system (culture). He addressed the need for differing rhythm cycles of cultural identity to calibrate especially in cross-cultural communication and that if different systems are not calibrated, unless a deliberate and successful effort is made to bring them into phase, the interaction could be problematic.

As each person has their own rhythm that makes up their personal identity, such calibration of rhythmic differences in interpersonal synchrony is essential in everyday interaction.

In contrast to research in anthropology and human interaction, where entrainment, rhythm, and synchrony vary in how they are used depending on the specific discipline, in music there seem to be more consistent distinctions made between these terms.

Justin London (2004 p. 4) defines rhythm as ‘involving patterns of duration that are phenomenally (in our perception) present in the music, and these patterns are often referred to as rhythmic groups. Meter, which is a component of rhythm, involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythmic surface of the music as it unfolds in time. In psychological terms, rhythm involves the structure of the temporal stimulus, whilst meter involves our perception and cognition of such stimuli.’ From an embodied perspective, Vijay Iyer defines rhythm as related to human motion, and meter to the regularity of human motion (Iyer 2002 p. 394).

Himberg describes rhythm as being in the notes, and meter as the psychological or architectural structure, the grid of stronger and weaker beats and higher and lower levels of metrical regularity that helps us perceive music. He gives the example of how a body can move in synchrony with the music played on a CD, two people dancing to that music are perhaps synchronized with the beat of that music, and their movements are entrained to each other. The meter of the music is embodied in them, in that their feet move to each beat, whilst their bodies twist and turn every two beats or every four beats (Toiviainen et al. 2010). In addition to synchronizing to these different metrical levels, they might display movements in the rhythm of the music, or their bodies move in rhythms in response to the music or each other. These rhythms in movement might be the signature three claps of cha cha cha or something else. When a jazz singer sings ‘I’ve got rhythm’, they mean something else. They probably mean that they have got an excellent sense of meter and that they are able to align the rhythms of their note onsets with the underlying metrical grid in such a way that it generates a sense of movement in the listener and a pleasurable, positive affect in the audience, in response to their performance.

William Condon proposed that being able to entrain in time with another person facilitates physical and emotional well-being (Condon and Ogston 1966), and this has been shown to be the case by researchers in music psychology (Rabinowitch et al. 2011; Hove and Risen 2009). The mistiming in beat, the inability to synchronize, creates problems at a psychological and emotional level and physical illness. Working in psychiatry, Condon sought to understand the relationship between rhythm and health and well-being. Not being able to be with others leads to destabilization.

Condon et al. (Op. cit.) analysed ‘patterns of change’ within ongoing behaviour. Intensive analysis at 1/48th frame per sec (f.p.s.) ‘revealed harmonious or synchronous organizations of change between body motion and speech in both intra-individual and interactional behaviour’. They describe the body of the speaker as dancing in time with their speech, and the body of the listener as dancing in rhythm with the speaker’s speech. Speaker and listener ‘also display body motion organizations of change which are isomorphic with the articulated organization of speech. This shared pattern of change ceases at the word level and occurs with differing configurations of change in relation to phrase and utterance length segments.’ He describes the ‘harmony’ between the body and speech of the speaker as self-synchrony, and the ‘further harmony’ between speaker and listener as ‘interactional synchrony’. Not only did he find this in dyads, but also he found it amongst a group where 7 people are listening to an eight person. Later, Kendon (1990) describes how two listener bodies and gestures move to a third speaker’s voice, whilst the speaker’s body moves to his own voice.

Synchrony only becomes a force for connection when we are synchronized both within ourselves and with another person. Synchronizing to an external beat, such as music, allows us to achieve a degree of synchrony when we are both present to each other whilst listening to it, but it is only when we intend to dance with another person that we have mutual synchrony. Mutual and interpersonal synchrony requires us to have the goal to communicate or perform an activity together.

We may notice another person in a group when they are not in sync with everything else. In a study of a group of students collaborating on a project, it was found that when one person’s body goes still for longer that it is supposed to, it becomes noticed (Gill and Borchers 2004). Only one person needs to notice in order for the rest of the group to become aware. Awareness here is peripheral awareness, and in this example, of a change in the spatial temporal trajectory of the group flow. It may be that to witness, the person that is being witnessed has altered something in the temporal dynamics of the group and the environment.

One possible way to analyse this phenomena would be kinesics which is about the movement patterns of the body (Birdwhistle 1970). One of the early founding researchers of kinesics, Scheflen (1973, 1974) was interested in events that go on between two or more people and where changes in movement and posture really mark boundaries of interpersonal events. For instance, at some point in the conversation, one person changes their position, shifts weight, or something and the others follow suit. This change usually marks a change in the nature of what has been happening amongst the participants; it is not ‘just a move’, but a move that in context has a distinct meaning. This meaning is a signal marking the end of one kind of event and the start of another, a boundary between two kinds of exchange. To study this kind of interaction, the focus is not simply on the actual form of any one gesture, posture, or expression but rather on the changes in motion, posture, expression, and arrangements, and what kind of communicative flow these changes have in the dyadic (or multiple) flow of events between people.

Kendon (1972, 1990), Condon, and ET Hall have all been influenced by kinesics, with Condon continuing this research throughout his life, such as his work on synchrony and pathologies, and mother–baby interaction. Their work has been an important influence on the study of time and rhythm in kinesics in human interaction to reveal behaviours that are occurring without us having an explicit awareness of them yet impact on the ways in which we perceive and understand or misunderstand each other.

There is growing research on understanding how our bodies move with voice and how voices move with each other in synchrony. For example, Shockley et al. (2007) have found that convergent speaking patterns affect human interpersonal postural coordination. If you have two sets of two individuals and compare their utterance of the same word, the postural movement with that word of either person from one pair would not be synchronized with that of a person from the other pair. It only occurs within the pairs. Shared postural activity increases when members of a pair are in the presence of one another but does not increase when they are not.

Vocalization in conversation can couple the movements in human interaction (Condon and Ogston 1966; Kendon 1972, Kendon 1983; Gill 2002; Shockley et al. 2003, 2007). Consider the case of talking on the phone. In addition to listening to what each other are saying, we rely on phonological features to gauge and grasp the intent and sense of the other, i.e. including breath, modulation, pitch, pulse, tempo, and rhythm. As we do so, our bodies move with these features, both as we speak and as the other speaks (Bavelas 2007). In grounding our communication, we occasionally move simultaneously in body (even in a silent pause, e.g. nodding our heads at the same time) and speech (Gill and Kawamori 2002; Shockley et al. 2003).

Work in phonetics by Local (2003); Local 2003) and Local (2007) shows how qualities in vocal sounds of participants are taken up by each other, where pitch, tempo, melody, function to bind turn-taking dynamics. ‘Participants attend to the moment-by-moment evolution of complexes of phonetic detail and what that detail encodes about other levels of linguistic organization so that they can locate the precise temporal moment to begin their talk’ (Local 2003 p. 4). They seem to monitor the phonetic and timing detail of both their own talk and the talk of others and can entrain the rate, rhythm, timing, and also pitch range and loudness characteristics of their speech to that which has just been produced by another speaker (Local 2007).

Within neuroscience, the study of interpersonal synchrony is a new and emerging area of research. The discovery of mirror neurons in 2001 heralded the possibility that we are hardwired to connect with each other and be intersubjective.

Mirror neurons were discovered in a study of macaque moneys (Rizzolatti et al. 2001). These neurons are activated by visual stimuli only when there is interaction between the action’s agent (human being or a monkey) and its object, such as grasping or holding. It was found that these neurons are simultaneously fired in brains of the macaque who is performing the action and the macaque who is watching this happen. Gallese and Rizollati et al. propose that mirror neurons may be a basic organizational feature of our brain, enabling inter-subjective experiences; however, at the present time, this is speculative.

Related to this, and addressing our capacity for empathy, is work by Anders et al. (2011) that investigates how the brains of people transmit affective information in facial communication. The level of neural activity within a distributed network of the perceiver’s brain can be successfully predicted from the neural activity in the same network in the sender’s brain, depending on the affect that is currently being communicated. Also, time plays a role in the flow of affective information with information in the perceiver’s brain being significantly delayed relative to information in the sender’s brain. This delay decreases over time, possibly reflecting some ‘tuning in’ of the perceiver with the sender. Ander’s et al. (Ibid) also suggest that observing a facial expression of affect activates part of a somato-motor network that is also activated when persons express their own affect (Carr et al. 2003; Leslie et al. 2004; Hennenlotter et al. 2005; van der Gaag et al. 2007). Bavelas et al. (1987) study shows that a sympathetic response to a grimace of pain is made only when eye contact is made, that is, it is a communicative act.

From the domain of music and neuroscience, Grahn (2009) provides a comprehensive review of the various research approaches and finding, citing the lack of consensus about timing mechanisms and the problems of comparing neuroscientific findings across different studies. ‘Rhythm’ is defined as the pattern of temporal intervals in a stimulus sequence that can induce an internal pulse (we ‘feel the beat’), and the internal organization of these pulses can lead to the perception of a recurring pattern of relative pulse strengths termed ‘meter’. The process of synchronizing the endogenous pulse with an external rhythm is called ‘entrainment’. In human interaction, this involves the mutual co-adaptation between persons.

Grahn takes us through the ways in which rhythm has been analysed in the brain, forewarning that there is little consensus about the best way to model timing, or how timing is accomplished neurally. ‘Timing has been modelled with neural clock or counter mechanisms, represented as either pulses (firing) or neural oscillations (Buhusi and Meck 2005; Ivry and Richardson 2002), but timing can also be implicit, or an emergent property of movement (Ivry and Spencer 2004)’. Neural oscillator approaches have been more successful in showing how higher-level features of temporal patterns, such as pulse and meter, can arise from the responses of neural non-linear oscillators to rhythmic stimuli (Large 2000, 2008), and this better fits the discussion in this paper on entrainment as coupling in interactional synchrony. Neural oscillation arises from interactions of excitatory and inhibitory neural populations. Through mathematical modelling of these interactions, the universal properties of neural oscillation can be deduced, and these properties examined for features that may correspond to properties of rhythmic behaviour. This ‘neural resonance’ (neural oscillators resonating with rhythmic stimuli) approach gives rise to properties such as pulse and meter, which are aspects of rhythms that have not been easily accounted for by other types of models (Large and Snyder 2009).

Earlier in the paper, we mentioned Winkler et al.’s study (2009) of infants (2 or 3 days old) who are listening to simple rhythms whilst their brain responses are measured using EEG. Every so often, a part of the rhythm was omitted. In some cases, this omission did not disrupt the feel of the beat in the rhythm, but at other times it did. The researchers wanted to know whether the newborns could ‘feel the beat’ and tell when the beat was disrupted. A clear difference was found in their EEG measurements when listening to an omission that disrupted the beat as compared to an omission that did not disrupt the beat. The authors suggest that beat perception may be innate. It has also been found in another study that infants’ rhythm perception is influenced by being ‘bounced’ in time with music (Phillips-Silver and Trainor 2005).

Grahn believes that continued cross-disciplinary endeavours and communication between different fields of music, movement, and language research is needed in neuroscientific research into music. This resonates with Bispham’s call for more understanding on the relationship and differences between the ways entrainment works in music and in language.

Although much of the work in neuroscience is not directly dealing with human interpersonal synchrony, the emerging findings on rhythm and entrainment (perceiving and responding to beat, pulse), and on the mirroring of neural activity of certain motor actions, provide support for findings from studies of interpersonal synchrony that are based on experimental and observation techniques within various disciplines, most significantly music psychology, kinesics, interaction analysis.

In her work on witnessed presence, Nevejan (2009) argues that that our awareness and connectivity are highly affected by whether we are physically sharing the same space or are distributed and communicating via mediating technologies such as letters, emails, and now skype (see also Nevejan in this Volume). How we move in time together shapes social presence and witnessing.

The qualities of human rhythmic synchrony bear on understanding the relation between being mutually aware (witnessing) and being present in everyday life through the synchrony of self with other. Witnessing is taken to mean the sense of having knowledge and understanding within the communicative situation, and this embodies social responsibility for the interaction. Different levels of synchrony and rhythm in interaction connect us, ranging from the moment-by-moment continuity of mutual synchrony to emergent rhythms of pragmatic sense-making. Bavelas wrote of the immediacy of face-to-face communication, describing how at the micro-analysis level, addressees can be seen provide simultaneous feedback to the speaker. Almost forty years before this, Condon described in detail how at the micro-level, the listener’s facial movements occur simultaneously with the speakers, in differing facial parts. And it is this immediacy which makes for what Goffman (1963) terms our ‘sensing’ of the other. As this immediacy becomes altered by a piece of glass placed in between us right through to looking at each other via mediating screens, it affects how we synchronize in time. In this space between self and other marked by the glass and screen, witnessing becomes mediated and mutual awareness now entails a combination of interpretation and sensing. The greater the disturbance to intra- and interpersonal synchrony, the less able we are to sustain mutual awareness that implicitly embodies the social responsibility towards another. Goffman envisioned that the problems of sensing in distributed communication would disappear once we could communicate via ‘TV screens’ but the complexity of intra- and interpersonal synchrony has not made it a simple matter, and it is necessary to understand this complexity of human synchrony and entrainment to analyse how we manage our mediated interaction and the implications for witnessing in social presence.

The analysis of synchrony and rhythm in interpersonal communication and human cognition is a growing area of research across various disciplines.

For example, just in 2009, researchers developing avatars for multi-modal interfaces in a recent European COST Action 2102 (2009) addressed the operation of synchrony in the dynamics of human spoken interaction. In research on language, recent papers by Levinson are opening a discussion on the conversational turn itself as having a temporal quality which facilitates the rhythmicity in speech (2011), and that this temporal structure creates the momentum for positive joint interaction (2006). Furthermore, work by Local (Local 2003, 2007; Local and Walker 2004) on phonetics suggests that phonology entrains turn taking through natural vocal interpersonal synchrony and is also a dimension of the construction of the turn (via abrupt joins, e.g. the shifts in what a person is saying).

On the relation between music and language, work in music psychology by Cross (2011) is identifying that there is a correlation at the level of the relational, and he has shifted the idea of intentionality from the linguistic cognitive domain to the relational domain with the concept of ‘floating intentionality’.

Research on interpersonal synchrony, for example the work of Condon, has shown that our capacity to mutually adapt to each other is fundamental for us to survive as social beings. This is supported by studies in music psychology by Himberg (2008, 2011) who reveal that if two people are asked to move to an artificial beat (e.g. the metronome) and can also hear each other’s movements (e.g. finger taps), they will naturally mutually adapt with each other’s beats than to the artificial beat without conscious awareness.

In the cross-cultural setting such mutual adaptation is not immediate and requires enculturation. In Hall’s proxemics dance of the Americans and Mediterranean persons (Hall 1983), the need to maintain the cultural body space was expressed in their synchrony of moving every 30 s to readjust their differences, but there was no mutual adaptation taking place to manage their cultural difference. The calibration that Hall speaks of as being essential for cultural understanding is understood to mean mutual adaptation.

It is becoming evident from these various studies that periodicity, synchrony, and entrainment processes within music and human conversation may share some correlates. For example, the human capacity for error correction studied in music psychology (Repp 2005) and in kinesics and cross-cultural interaction (Hall 1977) may provide evidence of such correlation.

Interpersonal synchrony in both musical and linguistic interaction is managed by regulating both self-synchrony (intra) and interpersonal synchrony (Condon and Sander 1974; Gill et al. 2000; Bavelas et al. 2008). However, the correlates between music and language might not be understood by simply applying concepts from music to the case of language or vice versa, as language has ‘discontinuities’ such as pauses and endings and ‘simultaneous events’, whereas music is based on continuous periodicities. Consider the case of Body Moves. These pragmatic rhythms of coupling seem to emerge sporadically in human communication yet they are not arbitrary. They serve to both maintain the commitment to engage with and understand each other, and the simultaneous rhythmic form of the Parallel Coordinated Move facilitates tacit knowing. Body Moves may not be explained using the continuous periodicity model although, being moments of coupling, they are a form of entrainment. An understanding of periodicity and entrainment within human communication would require a multi-level analysis to account for the continuity of committed engagement and the multi-modality of interpersonal synchrony. Such a framework needs to explain how intra- and interpersonal synchrony is managed at the various levels and what the relationship between these levels is.

Rhythm is sensing in flow and this flow shapes quality of life. Witnessing is part of flow, lying in the synchronization of self with other (where other could be multiple others, or movements in the environment), and bearing witness is when we notice that the flow is disturbed. In the space mediated by glass or screens, such rhythm is essentially altered with the distance in the separation of embodied space, as is quality of life. And yet, despite the disruptions, delays, of mediated interaction, people are motivated to tune to each other. What we do not know, and further research needs to be done, is how we tune in mediated space, and how this differs from immediate physically shared space. The discussion above has provided some parameters of synchrony, entrainment, and rhythm for such a comparative analysis, whilst laying out the need for further research in understanding the complexity of moving and perceiving in time with another person, and the effect this has on human sociality.

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