The first thing that becomes obvious when one is documenting the studies in human and social science dedicated to rhythmic phenomena or using rhythm as operating concept – whatever its definition – is the rapid increase in their number. Whereas thirty years ago rhythmic studies were very few and confined to sociology, economics, philosophy, musicology and poetics, they now both multiply and spread into new disciplines. For the last twenty years, rhythmic research has been developing in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and cognitive science. It emerged in anthropology, history, geography, urbanism. We saw it rising in linguistics and communication science – even in fields of knowledge that are more art than science, such as management and learning sciences. To make it short, we are witnessing a quite remarkable blooming of studies on rhythm or using rhythm as a tool.

This initial finding raises a question: should we see this re-emergence of rhythm as more than a fad? Should we see it, more specifically, as a transformation of knowledge or what one might call a ‘paradigm shift’? Assuming that we define the concept of ‘paradigm’ as Thomas Kuhn did in the early 1960s, this would require that some problems, methods, concepts or certain findings would effectively be shared by a sufficiently large number of science and would provide a framework or a common epistemological support. Nowadays, obviously, this is not the case. Although increasingly frequent and spread in various fields, attention to rhythmic thematics remains dispersed and borrowings between disciplines are still rather rare.

This can be interpreted in three ways. The first, the most radical, would be that there is no and there will never be such thing as a ‘rhythm paradigm.’ This interpretation cannot be excluded from the outset but it has the flaw to close the debate even though we have not yet verified whether other interpretations are possible. The second, which is already a little more favorable, would be that the various examples, that have just been quickly listed, suggest that we would be at the mere beginning of a paradigmatic shift. This shift would be advanced enough to be detectable but not enough to be effective. The substitution of the new epistemological framework to the previous one would not be completed yet but it could happen in a foreseeable future.