How does rhythm affect the reader

If you are comfortable with the rhythms, try to find where the first beat of each measure falls and determine the beat. The meter of a song is indicated by its time signature. The time signature consists of two numbers, stacked one on top of the other.

The top number represents the number of beats per measure, while the bottom number represents the note value for each beat. This is the most common and basic block of rhythm. Inside this rhythm, musicians can put almost any rhythm they want to. Whatever other elements a given piece of music may have e. Rhythm can exist without melody, as in the drumbeats of so-called primitive music, but melody cannot exist without rhythm.

Rhythm can be a powerful medium to stimulate communication and social interactions, due to the strong sensorimotor coupling. For example, the mere presence of an underlying beat or pulse can result in spontaneous motor responses such as hand clapping, foot stepping, and rhythmic vocalizations. Rhythmic sound synchronizes brain waves.

This means that our perception of the external world entering our mind through our eyes is affected by the rhythm of what we hear. Something seen at a point precisely in beat with an auditory rhythm is more likely to be perceived than if it appears out of synch with the rhythm. The rhythm of life is a way of life that brings our legitimate needs, our deepest desires, and our unique talents into harmony with each other. The body rhythms are called circadian rhythms.

These signal and affect every aspect of our life, for example, they govern when to wake up, to sleep, to be active and they determine how much energy we have. Felt emotion, therefore, only seemed to be influenced by rhyme in a sense that rhyming stanzas elicited a more positive emotional response than non-rhyming ones regardless of the varying contents of the stanzas.

This effect was stronger in the pseudo-word than real word stanzas. Figure 4. The left part shows the main effect of rhyme for the real word stanzas, whereas the right part depicts the main effect of meter for the pseudo-word stanzas.

The current study set out to investigate whether lexicality, meter, and rhyme as core components of poetry influence the aesthetic and emotional response to poetry in non-expert listeners. For this purpose, participants listened to a set of eight different versions of stanzas from nineteenth and early twentieth century German poetry and judged them on four different scales: liking, intensity, perceived emotion, and felt emotion.

Rhyme significantly influenced liking, intensity, perceived emotion as well as felt emotion ratings, with rhyming stanzas leading to a more positive aesthetic and emotional evaluation. Similarly, regular meter enhanced aesthetic liking and more intense emotional processing as compared to the non-metered versions of the stanzas. In contrast to meter and rhyme, lexicality, as hypothesized, did not impact the overall aesthetic appraisal of the stanzas, but only influenced the emotional ratings, i.

All main effects are in line with our proposed hypotheses and provide first empirical evidence in support of the assumption that the aesthetic evaluation of poetry relies mainly on the stylistic features of the respective stanzas independent of semantics.

Additionally, these findings lend support to the assumptions put forth by cognitive fluency theory, i. Besides the reported main effects two interactions warrant a closer look and discussion. First, lexicality meter, and rhyme interact and influence perceived emotion ratings. This is in line with one of the assumption of cognitive poetics that both stylistic factors and semantic content should contribute to the emotional response in a perceiver.

However, when resolving this interaction, only a quantitative difference for rhyme remained at different levels of lexicality. Specifically, rhyming stanzas elicited more positive ratings than non-rhyming ones.

This effect was stronger for pseudo-word stanzas than for real word stanzas suggesting that lexicality indeed affects the emotional response to poetry. Possibly, rhyme exhibits a stronger influence on felt emotion if there is no meaning that can interfere with its effect. More importantly, however, the effect of rhyme in the felt emotion rating may also reflect the higher saliency of rhyme in the stimulus material as compared to the meter manipulation, as we did not find any effects of meter in the felt emotion ratings.

Again, this result is in line with our hypotheses. A potential explanation for the absence of a similar effect for meter may well be due to the fact that we used only single stanzas. In all likelihood, the effect of meter grows stronger over time, and units of four verses may simply be too short for meter to take hold of the reader.

Second, we also found a significant interaction between lexicality and meter for the perceived emotion ratings i. Whereas there was no effect of meter in the real word stanzas — most likely because lexicality strongly contributes to the emotion we attribute to a poem, — non-metered pseudo-word stanzas surprisingly elicited more positively perceived emotions than metered pseudo-word stanzas.

Thereby, the findings provide first experimental evidence for key assumptions put forward both by classical rhetoric and more recent cognitive poetics: the processing of a poem by a listener is indeed linked to its poetic structure.

Interestingly, rhyme and meter that structure poetry at different temporal levels seem to affect the ratings rather independently, suggesting that they may also affect different cognitive processes. The research leaves open the question to what extent the present findings extend beyond lyrical poetry to other uses of meter and rhyme in speech and language. Potentially, the present findings could also be of broad relevance for spoken language perception per se.

Temporal patterning based on metrical structure is present in spoken language and primarily referred to as prosody. Though the metrical structuring may not be as obvious as in poetic stanzas, there is little doubt that it is used in rhetorical persuasion or advertisement and has significant impact on the cognitive and emotional processing of communicative messages. Furthermore, the use of temporal structuring also goes far beyond the spoken word as we use communicative mimics, postures, and gestures.

Therefore, the present data provides first evidence to further investigate how temporally coded paralinguistic factors contribute and interact in interpersonal communication and the cognitive and emotional processes underlying it. Although the present data are in line with the propositions made by cognitive poetics, they cannot clarify two important and open issues that have not been satisfactorily addressed by cognitive poetics so far: what kind of cognitive processes are involved when listening to poetry and how are certain structures in poetry linked to either a positive or negative evaluation of a poem by the perceiver?

Importantly, it is not the experience of fluency itself that leads to the liking of dot patterns, faces, paintings, etc. In other words, cognitive fluency serves as a basis for the liking of a stimulus or an object. Therefore, it is important to identify which factors influence the degree of cognitive fluency.

Previous research has shown that it depends both on the idiosyncratic processing experience of the recipient as well as on the features of the object to be processed.

Using visual stimulation e. For instance, Palmer and Hemenway presented letters that were either vertically or horizontally mirrored. Measuring reaction times, the authors were able to show that vertical symmetry is easier faster to detect than horizontal symmetry. Note that cognitive fluency research so far has almost exclusively focused on visual stimuli. There is only a small amount of auditory perception studies that have been interpreted within the cognitive fluency framework e.

Nevertheless, as stated above, features such as meter and rhyme also represent patterns of recurrence similar to dot patterns or letters, which in general should also affect the ease of cognitive processing based on familiarity, clarity, or symmetry.

In fact, some studies have already shown facilitatory effects on cognitive processing for both rhyme and meter meter: e. For instance, previous ERP studies have shown that rhyming word pairs are easier to process than non-rhyming word pairs e. Similarly, regular meter eases word list or sentence processing in comparison to irregular meter e.

Based on such findings, it is likely that rhyme and meter influence the evaluation of poetry by mechanisms put forward in the cognitive fluency theory. More precisely, rhyme and regular meter ease the cognitive processing of a poem and consequently the respective poem receives more positive aesthetic and emotional appraisal. However, to really understand the cognitive processes involved in poetry perception and their relation to the aesthetic and emotional consequences elicited in the perceiver, one has to investigate its neural basis by means of imaging techniques EEG, MEG, fMRI.

Such a neuroaesthetic approach has already been successfully applied to the processing of visual art and music for a review, see Chatterjee, Therefore, we call for the neuroaesthetics of poetry to elucidate the cognitive processes involved in poetic reception 5 and their relation to the aesthetic and emotional response in the perceiver.

The present rating study provides first experimental evidence that stylistic and structural devices such as meter and rhyme influence aesthetic and emotional responses to poetry. Specifically, regular meter and rhyme lead to a heightened aesthetic appreciation and intensity of processing as well as more positive emotional responses. A potential cognitive account for the present findings is provided by the cognitive fluency theory. However, neuroscientific investigations are needed to provide specific insight into the underlying neural and cognitive basis of such findings.

We therefore propose a neuroaesthetic approach to investigate poetry reception. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We thank Andrea Gast-Sandmann for graphics assistance. Allopenna, P. Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: evidence for continuous mapping models. CrossRef Full Text.

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External rhyme is the rhyming of words at the end of lines. Shel Silverstein's poetry is a great example of this.

Rhyme functions in much the same way as rhythm. It keeps the poem in harmony, and a rhyme scheme helps the audience to understand what is coming. Rhyme scheme can be figured by looking at the last word in each line and assigning a letter. The last word in the first line gets an "a.