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This article analyzes algorithm awareness as a process—a series of activities intended to reach a goal over time. It examines how a group of Costa Ricans understood, felt about, and related to TikTok and its algorithms as they began using the app for the first time. Data come from diary entries completed by 43 participants about their use of TikTok over a month and seven focus groups with these diarists. The article discusses five activities through which users expressed developing forms of awareness of TikToks' algorithms and enacted various rhythms in the experience of the app: managing expectations about what TikTok is and how it works; "training" the app; experiencing a sense of algorithmic personalization; dealing with oscillations in the pertinence of recommendations; and showing various forms of rejection of TikTok. The article then considers some implications of bringing time to the fore in the study of algorithm awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Music that evokes strong emotional responses is often experienced as autobiographically salient. Through emotional experience, the musical features of songs could also contribute to their subjective autobiographical saliency. Songs which have been popular during adolescence or young adulthood (ages 10–30) are more likely to evoke stronger memories, a phenomenon known as a reminiscence bump. In the present study, we sought to determine how song-specific age, emotional responsiveness to music, musical features, and subjective memory functioning contribute to the subjective autobiographical saliency of music in older adults. In a music listening study, 112 participants rated excerpts of popular songs from the 1950s to the 1980s for autobiographical saliency. Additionally, they filled out questionnaires about emotional responsiveness to music and subjective memory functioning. The song excerpts' musical features were extracted computationally using MIRtoolbox. Results showed that autobiographical saliency was best predicted by song-specific age and emotional responsiveness to music and musical features. Newer songs that were more similar in rhythm to older songs were also rated higher in autobiographical saliency. Overall, this study contributes to autobiographical memory research by uncovering a set of factors affecting the subjective autobiographical saliency of music. [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]

Although temporally nonadjacent key relationships (e.g., Key X →Key Y→ Key X) are ubiquitous within tonal music, the full extent to which they are perceived is uncertain. Previous research suggests that memory for an initial key remains active up to 20 s after modulation; however, homophonic textures were used in these studies, leaving open the possibility that surface features such as figuration may contribute to nonadjacency effects. In two experiments, we investigated this issue by measuring goodness of completion ratings for stimuli in which musical surface features were manipulated. Two types of surface feature were tested: figuration and activity (total number of notes per stimulus). Stimuli were composed of three parts: (1) nonadjacent section (in either the same or a different key to the probe); (2) intervening section (in a different key to the probe); and (3) probe (a cadence in either the same or different key as the nonadjacent section). In Experiment 1, we tested whether the presence of surface features resulted in higher goodness of completion ratings for the probe; in Experiment 2, we manipulated nonadjacent key relationships to ascertain the effect of surface features on global perception of key. Results showed that figuration and activity contributed to goodness of completion ratings, particularly in stimuli where these features matched each other in the nonadjacent sections. Moreover, the presence of surface features strengthened the perceived relationships between the keys of nonadjacent sections, thereby appearing to contribute to the global perception of phrase. In sum, although from an analytical perspective surface features are often considered to be less important hierarchically, our results indicate that they contribute significantly to the perception of nonadjacent key relationships. [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 possibility of using rhythmic auditory interventions for addressing dyslexia-related difficulties has been empirically explored by several investigations, with encouraging results. Such findings inspired the design of a novel rhythm-based intervention, Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT), specifically designed for students with developmental dyslexia (DD). To measure RRT efficacy, a clinical trial with an active-controlled design was carried out. More precisely, RRT combined with music games was contrasted with a personalized multi-componential treatment of DD of proven efficacy, namely, the Abilmente approach. Thirty-two children and preadolescents with DD received either one of the two interventions under the supervision of a specialized trainer. Immediate- and medium-term effects on reading skills did not differ between the two interventions. The analysis of the specific contribution of each methodology showed that the Abilmente approach was more effective in improving text reading, while RRT induced more consistent maintenance of all reading sub-processes 4 weeks after the end of the treatment. Consistent with previous research, the rhythmic intervention showed more consistent effects on reading speed. These results confirmed the efficacy of a unimodal process-based intervention such as RRT in inducing global reading effects comparable with those following a personalized multi-componential intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the phenomenon of beat-deafness has been explored in clinical contexts, few studies have investigated how rhythmically challenged people experience the act of keeping time with music. Task-based semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants who self-identified as being unable to clap in time to a beat. Participants were asked to keep time with a gradated battery of musical stimuli using both claps and alternative gestures (e.g. head nodding, swaying) and to articulate their timekeeping experience and strategies. Analysis reveals three core themes: (a) an apparent disconnect between the act of identifying the beat and the physical act of clapping, (b) variation in strategies for keeping time depending on the type of musical example (i.e., whether the beat was explicitly played by a percussive instrument or not), and (c) variation in the ease of coordination and listening experience when a movement other than clapping was used to keep time. Despite being small in scale, this qualitative study sheds light on some of the underlying strategies and processes involved in beat abstraction and keeping time to music, informing options for the musical training of rhythmically challenged people. [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]

Despite the long history of music psychology, rhythm similarity perception remains largely unexplored. Several studies suggest that edit-distance--the minimum number of notational changes required to transform one rhythm into another--predicts similarity judgments. However, the ecological validity of edit-distance remains elusive. We investigated whether the edit-distance model can predict perceptual similarity between rhythms that also differed in a fundamental characteristic of music--tempo. Eighteen participants rated the similarity between a series of rhythms presented in a pairwise fashion. The edit-distance of these rhythms varied from 1 to 4, and tempo was set at either 90 or 150 beats per minute (BPM). A test of congruence among distance matrices (CADM) indicated significant inter-participant reliability of ratings, and non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) visualized that the ratings were clustered based upon both tempo and whether rhythms shared an identical onset pattern, a novel effect we termed rhythm primacy. Finally, Mantel tests revealed significant correlations of edit-distance with similarity ratings on both within- and between-tempo rhythms. Our findings corroborated that the edit-distance predicts rhythm similarity and demonstrated that the edit-distance accounts for similarity of rhythms that are markedly different in tempo. This suggests that rhythmic gestalt is invariant to differences in tempo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]