Cohn’s Platonic Model and the Regular Irregularities of Recent Popular Multimedia

Abstract

Richard Cohn’s Platonic model of funky rhythms can be converted into a property that closely matches the asymmetrical temporal successions that most frequently occur in recent popular English-language multimedia. In the case of quintuple and septuple meters, this property also closely matches successions that most frequently occur in other forms of popular music as well. The movies from which the evidence for this claim comes range fromThe Magnificent Sevenof 1960 toKung Fu Panda 3of 2016. Some short but close analyses of filmic scenes demonstrate this property's effectiveness as a hermeneutical tool. A related property of “near realization” recruits Christopher Hasty’s projective model to explain this stylistic bias, and connects these asymmetrical successions with another seemingly dissimilar class of syncopated rhythms favored in popular music.