Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

complexities of sound were produced by either gradually or suddenly changing the
speed of the tape to distort the tape loop’s frequency. Riley’s tape loop experiments
led him to explore the effects of repetition, which was to become a centrally important
feature of minimalist music.
Riley’s work strongly influenced other minimalist composers. One of the most
famous minimalist tape compositions is Steve Reich’s 1965 It’s Gonna Rain. Reich
recorded a sermon of a famous street preacher, Brother Walter, who made frequent
Sunday appearances in San Francisco’s Union Square. From this recording,
Reich made a tape loop of a segment of the sermon that contained the title phrase.
Reich (2002) played two copies of this tape loop simultaneously on different tape
machines, and made a profound discovery:
In the process of trying to line up two identical tape loops in some particular
relationship, I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply
lining the loops up in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each
other. (Reich, 2002, p. 20)
He recorded the result of phase-shifting the loops, and composed his piece by
phase-shifting a loop of this recording. Composer Brian Eno describes Reich’s It’s
Gonna Rain thus:
The piece is very, very interesting because it’s tremendously simple. It’s a piece
of music that anybody could have made. But the results, sonically, are very
complex. . . . What you become aware of is that you are getting a huge amount of
material and experience from a very, very simple starting point. (Eno, 1996)
The complexities of It’s Gonna Rain emerge from the dynamic combination of
simple components, and thus are easily linked to the surrender of control that was
begun by John Cage. However, they also depend to a large extent upon the perceptual
processes of a listener when confronted with the continuous repetition of
sound fragments. “The mind is mesmerized by repetition, put into such a state that
small motifs can leap out of the music with a distinctness quite unrelated to their
acoustic dominance” (Griffiths, 1994, p. 167). From a perceptual point of view, it is
impossible to maintain a constant perception of a repeated sound segment. During
the course of listening, the perceptual system will habituate to some aspects of it,
and as a result—as if by chance—new regularities will emerge. “The listening experience
itself can become aleatory in music[,] subject to ‘aural illusions’” (p. 166).
Minimalism took advantage of the active role of the listener and exploited repetition
to deliberately produce aural illusions. The ultimate effect of a minimalist
composition is not a message created by the composer and delivered to a (passive)
audience, but is instead a collaborative effort between musician and listener. Again,
this mirrors the interactive view of world and agent that characterizes embodied
296 Chapter 6