Body + Movement + Irregular Matter → Rhythm

Let us start with a simple proposition: rhythm as a feature of experience (rather than an abstract pattern) arises from a body encountering variation in matter through movement. Without a body there would be no sense. In a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there would be no (non-degenerate)rhythm regardless of movement. Running your finger across the ridges of the sea shell, you feel irregular pressure on your skin that you can interpret as a rhythm – a pattern of irregular variation of sensation correlate with your movement. Stopping your finger's movement you would feel no variation. If the shell were perfectly smooth, you also would feel no variation. So, corporeal movement and irregularities in matter are necessary to rhythmic experience. Notice that corporeal movement compounds the body as a necessary ingredient in having this experience. Feeling through the body, via embodied engagement is an inextricable component of experience. Thus, according to our formulation, body, movement and inhomogeneous matter are necessary for rhythm as sense. Regarding sense, Merleau-Ponty writes:

However, variation of matter and corporeal movement, while elemental as ingredients of a sense of rhythm, may not exhaustively account for the phenomenon. Rhythm as a temporal pattern in experience lies beyond or in between sense perceptions. One gets to a sense of rhythmic pattern via perception, but rhythm itself is not sense data. To borrow phenomenological vocabulary, rhythm is not perceived but apperceived.

The reader may find it completely obvious that rhythm is not to be found ‘out there’, to be represented by sense or sensor data, but rather is a feature of lived experience, and thus inextricably part of phenomena rather than data.