The experience of rhythm can be physical, generating additional rhythms with different formations of motion structures and dissimilar functions. It can also be experienced in an abstract form, when gazing upon a static structure such as a painting with rhythmic qualities in it. It can be a visual perception of interactions that convert stability to a hierarchically organized movement. Rhythm can be read, heard and performed; it can be seen, measured and analyzed; it can exist as bare and fragmented in a physical appearance or occur as an abstract presence in physiological concentrations. Rhythms can be translated into the ability to apply and utilize the movement to an outer base or source. To create causal nexus between the body, environment and the objects in one scene.
“I consider music the production of sound. And since in the piece which you will hear I produce sound, I would call it music,” stated the music theorist and composer John Cage before performing his piece “Water Walk” (1959). Cage experimented with sound compositions and challenged the perception of music by instrumentalists, singers, artists and the crowd. The use of uncommon instruments like an iron pipe, bathtub with water, ice cubes, rubber duck, a vase of roses and more to compose his music, received peals of laughter from the audience that contributed further to the makeup of the composition in “Water Walk”. The sequence of sounds, the movement in the space, the flow of the water and the pulse of the crowd’s laughter draw together a complete constituent of rhythms.
