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If our sociality is intertwined with the logics of social media, then the examination of the temporalities that are immanent in these technologies contributes to the understanding of our very conditions of existence. And even if algorithmic sorting is increasingly employed to deliver what is "relevant" at the "right-time," the notion of "real-time" still permeates these platforms' operations. Through a critical phenomenological approach, I examine the interplay of chronological and algorithmic ordering. To operationalize the idea of temporality as both subjectively experienced and always arranged by the platforms themselves, I use rhythm as an analytical device. Based on accounts of lived experience obtained through the conduction of the diary-interview method with London-based social media users, I foreground how "the algorithm" is used as a vehicle to make sense of platforms' temporalities, reflecting struggles and negotiations over social coordination and temporal control. I argue that realtimeness is also rhythmic, and can therefore be scrutinized as a "sensorial orchestration." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between humans and more-than-humans through the analysis of the rhythmic elements of the contemporary art installation Ajuar para un conquistador. An interdisciplinary approach bridges Art Studies and More-Than-Human Geographies to examine Ajuar and its environmental concerns, including the relationships between human and non-human worlds. Through 'rhuthmanalysis' – a new concept and word developed in the paper – textual and image analysis, and conversations with the artist, this study examines the social, cultural, and ecological meshwork of rhythms articulated within and by the art installation. 'Rhuthmanalysis' expands upon Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's rhythmanalytic project by incorporating Indigenous knowledge and an ecocritical standpoint while redefining the understanding of rhythm. The analysis explores how Ajuar, concerned with the endangerment of Patagonian birds, promotes a performative understanding of the artwork's capacities in the context of the interplay between the affective dimensions and politics of the creation of the Argentine nation-state. The paper argues that Ajuar participates in the social and political production of space and place, opening new forms of being together and challenging colonial narratives through a rhythmic lens. Moreover, this study seeks to offer a singular perspective on how approaching art as a rhythmic configuration of an intricate choreography of coexistence can provide unique insights into space and the environment. The paper concludes that 'rhuthmanalysis' is a privileged tool to address the need for a transdisciplinary methodology capable of giving account of the mutual unfolding of human and non-human existences and decolonising posthumanist geographies and rhythm studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhythm metrics can detect second language development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners' speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in first language (L1) Arabic / second language (L2) English, which differ in key properties contributing to the percept of rhythm: unstressed vowel reduction and syllable structure. Our production data are interpreted using additional measures, of stressed and unstressed vowels and of consonant cluster realization, alongside standard rhythm metrics; this combination facilitates disambiguation of competing interpretations of the metric results. The findings confirm the importance of using multiple rhythm metrics to study L2 speech rhythm and demonstrate how simple additional measures can guide interpretation of their results. In this study the metrics results showed that the speech produced by the L2 speakers, regardless of their length of residence in the UK, exhibited lower vocalic durational variability than the speech produced by the native Arabic and English speakers. However, closer inspection of the degree of vowel reduction by the native and nonnative groups confirms that no single metric captures the complex nature of the observed L2 rhythm patterns. Future L2 studies are advised not to draw firm conclusions about the degree of vowel reduction and consonant cluster realization in L2 speech based solely on the results of the rhythm metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French aspirateur, Catalan aspirador 'vacuum cleaner') while clapping to the rhythmic structure of those words or only repeated the words. Participants' oral productions before and after training were rated for accentedness by three French native speakers. Results showed that in both groups, participants' pronunciation improved after training, and crucially, children in the clapping group improved significantly more than those in the non-clapping group. Additionally, an acoustic analysis of the duration of word-final vowels indicated that only children in the clapping group significantly lengthened the final vowel after training, thus producing more target-like durational patterns. Our results suggest that a brief embodied intervention based on highlighting the rhythmic structure of words through hand-clapping has the potential to enhance pronunciation in a foreign language. The implications for second language teaching of pronunciation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article shares the innovative pedagogic practices I explored and developed to nurture temporal reflexivity in the classroom to engage students in the study of the sociology of time in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and a local strike. It takes the reader through the module as it was structured and delivered in two parts: from calendars to calibration and from memory to procrastination. This is interspersed with details of the learning exercises we undertook in the classroom and the module assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of living space we have access to is one manifestation of the unequal distribution of housing resources within societies. The COVID-19 pandemic has required most households to spend more time at home, unmasking inequalities and reigniting longstanding debates about the functionality and experience of smaller homes. Drawing on interviews across three UK cities, this article attends to the changing household routines of individuals living in different types of small home, exploring daily life before and during 'lockdown'. Using the concept of urban rhythms, the data show that the lockdown has intensified existing pressures of living in a smaller home – lack of space for different functions and household members – whilst constraining coping strategies, like spending time outside the home. Lockdown restrictions governing mobility and contact acted as a mechanism of exception, disrupting habitual patterns of life and sociability, and forcing people to spend more time in smaller homes that struggled to accommodate different functions, affecting home atmospheres. For some, the loss of normal strategies was so significant that they sought to challenge the new rules governing daily life to protect their wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical schools are among the most important spaces for the history of the body. It is here that students come to know the anatomical bodies of their future patients and, through a process of cognitive and embodied practice, that the knowing bodies of future clinicians are also shaped. Practical and theoretical understandings of medicine are formed in these affective and historied buildings and in collaboration with a broad material culture of education. Medical schools are, however, both under-theorised and under-historicised. This article integrates 'materialist' considerations of the body with Henri Lefebvre's philosophy of space and rhythm in order to compare two markedly different spaces – the 19th-century Anatomy Department at Semmelweis University in Hungary and the mid-20th-century 'skills laboratory' at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. This comparison suggests that biomedical bodies are variously shaped by the agential and affective material histories present in the everyday experience of contemporary medical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's 'rhythmanalysis', taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of 'blurred' or 'merged' time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical experience facilitates speech perception. French musicians, to whom stress is foreign, have been found to perceive English stress more accurately than French non-musicians. This study investigated whether this musical advantage also applies to native listeners. English musicians and non-musicians completed an English stress discrimination task and two control tasks. With age, non-verbal intelligence and short-term memory controlled, the musicians exhibited a perceptual advantage relative to the non-musicians. This perceptual advantage was equally potent to both trochaic and iambic stress patterns. In terms of perceptual strategy, the two groups showed differential use of acoustic cues for iambic but not trochaic stress. Collectively, the results could be taken to suggest that musical experience enhances stress discrimination even among native listeners. Remarkably, this musical advantage is highly consistent and does not particularly favour either stress pattern. For iambic stress, the musical advantage appears to stem from the differential use of acoustic cues by musicians. For trochaic stress, the musical advantage may be rooted in enhanced durational sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chinese cities, informal street vendors often appear in a transient space intertwined with a large number of pedestrians and heterogeneity, in contrast with the dichotomous construction of static built environment and dynamic street activity examined in most studies on walkability. This paper explores the rhythm of everyday street spaces and the temporary experiences of pedestrians and street vendors in Yuncheng, China. The author argues that street vendors are particularly well suited for capturing city rhythms and can discern the tempo of social life and pedestrians in urban street spaces. Following Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis approach and drawing on 86 semi-structured interviews combined with on-site observation in three street spaces, this paper investigates how rhythms are linked to spatial form, time and the everyday street activity of walking and vending. It expands an analytical framework in both daily rhythms and long-standing rhythms, including arrhythmia, eurhythmia and polyrhythmia. The conclusions provide an alternative way of understanding why pedestrians emerge, through considering how street vendors temporarily meet the everyday needs of different pedestrians in specific, real and detailed ways. Such fine-grained narratives, in turn, demonstrate the need to advance theoretical and empirical understandings of multiple rhythms in relation to walkable space and walking forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the popular children's book The Gruffalo (1999) written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 80 different languages. The question that this article seeks to address is, to what extent has the language and style of The Gruffalo played a part in these commercial and cultural achievements? The article primarily explores the phenomena of meter, rhyme, rhythm and lexical repetition from interrelated linguistic and stylistic perspectives. It also brings these findings into a dialogue with some of the precepts and principles from both classical rhetoric and modern orality theory, especially pertaining to memory and delivery. Having weighed the linguistic evidence, the supposition is put forward that it is highly probable that the motivated language choices that have been made by the author, and the way those choices have been arranged and deployed in the story, have played a substantial role in the book's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Modern Hebrew, only three segmental markers are typically acknowledged as ethnically conditioned, and usage of these markers has significantly decreased in second and third generation speakers. Yet the sociolinguistic situation of diverging language backgrounds of first generation speakers, compounded with ethnic segregation in housing and the workforce, seems like a fertile ground for social identification from speech. We report two studies on prosodic variation in Modern Hebrew: a perception study and a “matched-pairs” corpus study. The results of the first illustrate that even in the absence of the known segmental markers, ethnicity perception of young native speakers may still diverge between two major ethnic identities, Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) and Ashkenazi (European). The main acoustic correlate was rhythm, measured as the proportional duration of vowels in the utterance. In the second study, actors’ speech rhythm was found to be modulated by their portrayed ethnic identity in the same direction, suggesting that this variable is socially salient—and for some speakers, controllable—enough to be involved in style shifting. This study joins a growing body of work illustrating that relatively mild rhythmic variation can contribute to social identification, and in the current case, also for ethnicity portrayal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global health development projects are inherently governed by bounded, temporal and linear time frames: the initiation, implementation and ending of time-limited interventions. This projectification of global health programmes has wide-reaching consequences as global health projects, often unsustainable and produces both new life possibilities and uncertain futures. This article highlights the temporal effects of the global health agenda on the primary health system rebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to how the projectification of public health programmes affected the primary healthcare management in a district in the southern region of Sierra Leone. Throughout this article, I develop the theoretical concept of chronicity of disruptive project rhythms where local public healthcare actors encounter project disruptions on a continuum of chronic lack. I base this concept on Manderson and Smith-Morris's definition of chronicity of illness experience, which is marked by punctuated episodes of acute sickness, where chronic patients are temporally transmuted into acute patients, while at the same time continuing to suffer from their ongoing chronic ailments. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, I show how a district health management team (DHMT) contested the bounded time frames of public health funding; how waiting time for funding impacted the operation of the DHMT and, by extension, the district health system as a whole and how DHMT employees and other actors within the health system employed time-tricking strategies to resist this project time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigates the average effect: the tendency for humans to appreciate an averaged (face, bird, wristwatch, car, and so on) over an individual instance. The effect holds across cultures, despite varying conceptualizations of attractiveness. While much research has been conducted on the average effect in visual perception, much less is known about the extent to which this effect applies to language and speech. This study investigates the attractiveness of average speech rhythms in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese, two typologically different languages. This was tested in a series of perception experiments in either language in which native listeners chose the most attractive one from a pair of acoustically manipulated rhythms. For each language, two experiments were carried out to control for the potential influence of the acoustic manipulation on the average effect. The results confirm the average effect in both languages, and they do not exclude individual variation in the listeners’ perception of attractiveness. The outcomes provide a new crosslinguistic perspective and give rise to alternative explanations to the average effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]