A State Of Flow

Yesterday was the first Solares after my return from the Far East. I'd been pondering the learning approach to the session, and had predicated the learning plan on the probability that the participants would have done very little practice. Hence I designed the workshop as a practice session, not as an overt learning session in a flipped classroom context.

The purpose to doing that was the removal of anxiety.

As we'd moved into investigating the domain of timelines and fundamental rhythms, solares participants are being asked to re-frame their embodiment activity as percussionists. Achieving a "state of flow" is essential to the activity's success.

According to Owen Schaffer's white paper "Crafting Fun User Experiences: A Method to Facilitate Flow, Human Factors International" (2013), there are seven conditions to be met for a state of flow to be achievable:

1. knowing what to do;
2. knowing how to do it;
3. knowing how well you're doing;
4. knowing where to go (if navigation is involved);
5. high perceived challenges;
6. high perceived skills; and
7. freedom from distractions.

In practice, these were satisfied within the exercise of: generating shaker tones synchronised to the audible tones of the conga's tumbao moderno, while performing salsa's atiempo embodiment rhythm, to a salsa track.

Conditions 1 & 2
were met through revision of exercises one through three from the last session (see: http://salsadiary.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/percussion-concept-attack.html).

Condition 3
was fulfilled by the short impulse sound of the shaker, providing immediate feedback on quality of performance.

Condition 4
largely irrelevant, was met by self-determination in the direction of the rhythmic walk.

Conditions 5 & 6
were satisfied by the as-yet undeveloped proficiency in the synchronous performance of two timeline rhythms: back-beat and embodiment; to a qualitatively stringent level (less than 40 milliseconds).

Condition 7
was met by the studio environment (privacy), exercise design (solo practice), and unobtrusive support (subtle remedial intervention).

Three common states disrupt the maintenance of flow:

• apathy - low challenge level, low skills level, engenders a general lack of interest
• boredom -  low challenge level, high skills level, causes a distracting search for higher challenges
• anxiety - high challenge level, low skills level, creates a feeling of uneasiness.

The latter is why the session was planned the way it was; to maximise the possibility of achieving the state of flow.

It succeeded.

At just before the workshop's mid-point, it was observable that each participant had entered (albeit inconsistently) entrainment. (See also PDF on entrainment by the Open University: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/experience/InTimeWithTheMusic.pdf). As proficiency increased, so did the need for challenge to maintain interest for flow. Adjustments to only three parameters were necessary:

1. variations in tempo,
2. quality of shaker tone, and
3. fine synchronisation between timelines.

This was the first time I'd seen solares' participants enter the biomusic state of flow, and it heralds an exciting threshold of possibilities in the workshops.

Loo Yeo

"pak"

True to my decision for a positive move to rhythm, I turned up to Solares armed with a learning game plan, a bagful of hand percussion, a compact conga, and a cajón. This approach to content - the meanings of rhythms to dancers - was new to Solares and although I had a direction, I couldn't anticipate the response nor outcomes, so I was loaded for bear.

There were two possible routes to take:

1. picking one timeline class and investigating-developing it to its fullest extent in the time available, or
2. skimming through the four timeline classes to give an overall feel for the rhythm capsule in ensemble.

I wouldn't know which route until I assessed Solares' participants response to the first exercise, which was designed as an indicator.

Background
Right from Solares' inception, the timing mechanism used has been based on the non-verbal vocalisation of the tumbao moderno's open tones "gung-gung" (beats 4 and 4+) either in full context of the music, synchronised to the actual open tones of the tumbao moderno played on congas by yours truly, or as a standalone rhythmic cue/timekeeper.

Backbeat Timeline: Tumbao Moderno rhythm
The lowest-hanging fruit was to explore the timeline in which the long-established "gung-gung" was a component - the backbeat* timeline. To put this more expressly, the tumbao moderno rhythm is an example of a backbeat timeline. To complete the timeline, all that was needed was the additional vocalisation "pak" on the European count of beat 2. Hence the vocalisation would be:

"gung-gung (4,4+), ... , pak (2), ..., gung-gung (4,4+), ... , pak (2), ..., " repeated

Exercise One
The Caribbean sway basic was used as the embodiment (i.e. dance) context.

1. "gung-gung" vocalisation followed by three steps, to yield:
   "gung-gung", step, step, step.
2. Then add the "pak" vocalisation synchronous with the second step:
   "gung-gung", step, "pak"step, step.

Results
All participants executed part 1 easily. But when it came to adding the "pak" vocalisation synchronous with their second step, they encountered difficulty. It took most of the workshop as learning time (with remedial instruction) to achieve independently reproducible practice. By default, Route 1 (above) became the course.

Participants' independence and reproducibility of practice was verified through the contrasting activity of incorporating the vocalisation in a simple rueda de casino comprising just basic guapea timesteps and dame partner changes.

Discussion
I believe two factors contributed to the unexpected initial lack of success.

1. The "gung-gung" had been interpreted as a component of the embodiment timeline, NOT as belonging to a separate timeline.
This meant that participants were only tracking one simple timeline. The addition of the "pak" forced the excision of "gung-gung" from the embodiment timeline into its proper backbeat timeline. Participants now had to track two timelines: the vocalised backbeat timeline and the stepped embodiment timeline. All-of-a-sudden, cognitive overhead had more than doubled since two timelines had to be maintained AND they had to be synchronised and merged to create a composite timeline**.

2. The "gung-gung" had been interpreted as a cue anticipating the beginning of the timeline NOT as the beginning itself.
The result, given that the human brain perceives regular meter as alternating strong and weak beats beginning with the strong***, was that the first and third steps coincided with the neurologically strong beats; the second step plus "pak", and the "gung-gung" fell on the neurologically weak beats.

Future Study
Participants' ability to track two separate timelines must continue to develop. This would allow for their merger to form a composite timeline yielding greater rhythmic stability; and an aesthetic investigation into what happens when a rhythm is allowed to modulate another rhythm.

A shift in the perceived start of the rhythmic timeline: from the first step to the "gung-gung" i.e. from the European to the African. To achieve success, "gung-gung" must be understood as important beats in their own right, not simply as cues to the (perceptually) more "important" beat of the first dance step. I think it likely that an interchanging dance-percussion ensemble format will be evaluated for its suitability.

Yeo Loo Yen

Notes
*The online definitions of the backbeat expose the limitations of the internet as a web resource. For example, Wikipedia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(music)#Backbeat) point to its origin as being in rock music, and FreeDictionary's (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/backbeat) limiting it as a characteristic of rock music. Neither mention its pre-existence in, for example, Senegambian music, nor trace how it came to be in rock music (see 'The Latin Tinge' by John Storm Roberts).

**"Paillard-Fraisse hypothesis" or "code-generation hypothesis" where dynamic stability of a rhythm is achieved through the establishment of a master time code via multi-rhythmic encoding. In:
Volman, M.J.M., and Geuze, R.H. (2000). Temporal stability of rhythmic tapping “on” and “off the beat”: A developmental study. Psychological Research Vol.63, pp.62-69.

***Brochard, R., Abecasis, D., Potter, D., Ragot, R., and Drake, C. (2003). The “TickTock” of Our Internal Clock: Direct Brain Evidence of Subjective Accents in Isochronous Sequences. Psychological Science Vol.14 No.4 pp.362-366.