Fluid Pulse — Temporal Elasticity in Iranian Rhythmic Practices

In many musical traditions, rhythm is imagined as a steady grid: an invisible metronome that performers follow while adding expressive variation around it. This model dominates most Western music theory and underlies how rhythm is taught, notated, and analysed. Yet in large parts of the world, including Iranian musical practice, rhythmic time is experienced differently. Time breathes, stretches, and contracts, while ensemble unity remains intact. This project calls that phenomenon Fluid Pulse.

Fluid Pulse is an artistic research project that investigates rhythmic elasticity as a primary organising principle of performance. Rather than treating timing flexibility as expressive deviation from a fixed beat, the project approaches elasticity itself as the structure that holds music together. In this view, rhythmic precision does not come from counting but from shared bodily awareness, gesture, breath, and mutual anticipation.

Rhythm Beyond the Grid

Iranian rhythmic traditions offer rich examples of temporal flexibility. Percussion-based repertoires such as reng, southern coastal grooves, and contemporary ensemble practices rely on subtle accelerations, decelerations, and micro-shifts that are collectively negotiated in real time. Performers remain tightly synchronised without relying on an explicit metronomic reference. Instead, timing is sustained through embodied cues: the lift of a hand, a shared inhale, the tension of a phrase, or the momentum of movement.

Such knowledge is usually transmitted through apprenticeship, imitation, and long-term ensemble playing. It is rarely written down and is difficult to capture through standard notation. As a result, existing scholarship on Iranian music has described rhythmic forms and cycles but has paid little attention to how elastic timing is actually coordinated in performance.

Embodied Knowledge as Research

Fluid Pulse treats artistic practice as a research method. The project works through rehearsal-based laboratories with Iranian musicians in Tehran, the Bushehr region, and Helsinki. In these sessions, performers rehearse, improvise, and re-enact specific timing passages, making their internal sense of time visible through action rather than explanation. Video, audio, and reflective discussion support the process, but musical practice remains the core source of knowledge.

Through these experiments, the project seeks to identify recurring timing strategies: characteristic gestures, breath patterns, anticipatory movements, and shared phrasing behaviours that allow elastic timing to remain coherent. These patterns form the basis of a conceptual model of Fluid Pulse — a relational temporal field produced collectively in performance.

From Tradition to Intercultural Practice

While rooted in Iranian musical practice, Fluid Pulse also explores how principles of embodied timing can travel across cultures. Mixed ensembles in Helsinki test how musicians from different backgrounds learn to coordinate flexible time without relying on fixed metric counting. This intercultural dimension opens new possibilities for contemporary composition, improvisation, and rhythm pedagogy.

The project also develops practical teaching tools that help students experience rhythmic flexibility through movement and interaction rather than abstract subdivision. These tools are designed for conservatory and community contexts where musicians increasingly work across stylistic and cultural boundaries.

Why Fluid Pulse Matters

Rhythmic elasticity is widely recognised by performers but remains difficult to explain, notate, or teach. By grounding research in embodied musical practice, Fluid Pulse makes this tacit knowledge visible and shareable. The project contributes to artistic research, intercultural music-making, and new ways of understanding how humans create shared time through sound and movement.