Research field 04 · Ritual Space
Music, repetition and perception
In the ritual course, music structures time: beginning, duration, recurrence, intensification and bringing back. Trance induction arises here in the interplay of several factors, not from a single sonic feature.
How does music change perception when it functions as a ritual course rather than as a concert work?
Core thesis
In the ritual space, music works through procedures rather than through a single trigger: repetition, tempo development, intensification, pause, sound spectrum, call-and-response, voice and the coupling to movement.
The decisive point is the course. Music sets a pulse and at the same time builds an order of expectation. It can bind attention, stabilise bodily movement, raise arousal, set short interruptions and then lead back into a shared stream. In this sense it is a medium of the threshold: it makes a transition audible and bodily co-enactable.
Pulse-driven intensification is only one pole. Sekeles distinguishes ecstatic healing rituals that drive the tempo from the resting pulse to nearly 200 BPM from hypnotic rituals with a constant, low tempo around 80 BPM. Ritual music equally includes calm, stillness, constant tempo, quiet repetition, drones, contemplative absorption and slowed perception. The Gnawa Lila stands here for the pulse- and intensification-related case.
My own study of the Gnawa Lila remains an important anchor for this. It shows musical trance induction as a multi-factor process: music, dance, colour, incense, social role, expectation and ritual order together form the effective fabric.
Material finding: the tempo dramaturgy of the Lila
In the thesis (2011) two Lila recordings were analysed over the same suite: Miftah Errahbah, Jilala and Bou Derbala. The finding shows above all how the intensification is organised dramaturgically: it begins near the resting pulse, leads through different forms of intensity to climaxes, sets caesuras and then works again with intensification.
The following curve is therefore an observation model of a concrete ritual course. Its strength lies in this specificity: it shows how music, in a particular ritual, guides time, body and expectation.
Excerpt from a Lila/Derdeba ceremony. The video shows an excerpt; the curve reconstructs a complete musical course.
- Beginning near the resting pulse (82 or 86 BPM); according to Sekeles, initial values around 75–80 BPM relate to the human resting rate.
- Types of intensification in the course: continuous, stepwise and abrupt; in between, slowings and clear caesuras.
- Values of the analysed suites: continuous ~82 to ~197 BPM (Essaouira); ~86 to ~160 BPM, after a caesura stepwise ~107 to ~174 BPM (Maalem Boussou).
- In highly intense phases, motif and tonal range tend to be reduced, while tempo, repetition and bodily coupling increase.
- The Maalem steers tempo, dynamics, repetition and transitions in real time and responds to the state of the dancers.
- Intensification connects more than acceleration. It brings together tempo, dynamics, repetition, reduction of material and bodily expectation.
- The caesura is part of the guidance. It lowers intensity, marks a transition and opens a new intensification.
- High intensity can work with reduction. Precisely the reduction of motif and tonal range can focus attention.
- The Maalem reads the space. The musical form is mobile and responds to dancers, group and ritual situation.
Musical parameters of ritual effect
The tempo dramaturgy of the Lila is a strong case, but only one section. For further research the material can be read as a field of parameters: music guides states through pulse, timbre, repetition, expectation, bodily coupling and meaning.
The Lila guides intensity through cyclical acceleration, intensification, caesura and renewed build-up. Sekeles describes ecstatic healing rituals with intensifications from the resting pulse to nearly 200 BPM.
The opposite of intensification can also support trance: constant tempo, reduced motif, a narrow tonal range and loop-like recurrence. The guembri phrases of the Lila show how few notes and ostinati can bind attention.
Recent studies describe particularly strong cortical synchronisation for beats around 1.6 Hz, i.e. roughly 96–100 BPM. This figure is an analytical anchor for bodily-neural coupling.
Binary and ternary pulses are understood here as rhythmically organic, often elliptical forms. Polyrhythm keeps several offers of movement open at once and can support flow, improvisation and social coupling.
Low components are felt auditorily and vibrotactilely: in the chest, in the floor, in the pressure of the sound. Neher's auditory-driving hypothesis and Rouget's cultural corrective still mark the tension between physiological stimulation and ritual meaning. High, metallic and rattling components such as qraqeb or shakers create density of stimulus and sensory intensification.
Voice carries timbre, emotion and content: invocation, poetry, a sung formula, spoken address and sermon focus attention. Call-and-response makes this transmission socially audible.
How the finding reads today
The thesis still worked heavily with the term trance induction. From today's perspective this term has to be framed more precisely. What is meant is a field of modes of experience: entrainment, absorption, ecstasy, dissociation, flow, suggestion and possession trance interlock differently depending on context.
Entrainment explains how body, movement and attention couple to rhythmic patterns. Absorption describes the deep binding of attention. More recent models of predictive processing help in addition: repetition makes sound predictable and binds perception; small deviations, syncopations or intensifications create a break in expectation, arousal and emotional peaks.
This refines the old finding: music is an essential factor, but it works as part of a setting. It opens and stabilises a threshold space whose effect only becomes legible through body, group, space, expectation, colour, smell, role, biographical situation and bringing back.
The tempo dramaturgy of the Gnawa Lila is a case model. The stronger statement is: rhythm, repetition, tempo, body technique and social synchrony are robust factors. What they mean is decided in the concrete ritual frame.
- The Maalem as real-time steerer of tempo, course and situation
- Sound carriers, singers, percussion group
- DJ and live looper as modern sound carriers — structurally comparable, without ritual authority by function
- Absorption, entrainment, trance
- Activation through intensification, calming through caesuras
- Conceptual clarification in the field States of consciousness
Sources
- Arystan Petzold: Musik und Trance (2011). Basis for fieldwork, analysis of tempo and dynamics, Maalem, micro-timing, trance induction and multi-factor logic.
- Musical factors of trance induction (working dossier 2026). An update of the thesis on neural entrainment, groove, predictive processing, sub-bass, roughness, voice and embodied music cognition.
- Update modules 2011–2026. Working status on the conceptual shift from “trance” towards absorption, dissociation, flow, suggestion, entrainment, set and setting.
- Chapter 12: From cultic address to algorithmic micro-sermon (working chapter 2025/2026). Reference point for voice, address, sermon, poetry and authorised speech as a ritual channel of transmission.
- Notes on my own live looping practice. Repetition is built up, layered and dissolved again in real time.
- Gilbert Rouget: Music and Trance. A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (1985). Foundational for the question of how music, possession and ritual roles relate; also important as a warning against simple sonic causes.
- Judith Becker: Deep Listeners. Music, Emotion, and Trancing (2004). Opens the view onto intense listening, emotion, body and the binding of attention beyond narrow models of possession.
- Chava Sekeles: Music: Motion and Emotion (1996). An older typology, but important for the thesis, on tempo, dynamics and healing rituals; to be read critically today.
- Andrew Neher (1962), Jörg Fachner (2007) and Baldassarre (1999, after Petzold 2011). Reference points for auditory driving, theta/alpha relations, bodily movement, high frequencies and the dispute between physiological and cultural explanation.
- Aparicio-Terrés et al. (2025), Nozaradan et al. (2011), Vuust et al. (2022), Koelsch, Vuust & Friston (2019), Margulis (2014), Witek et al. (2014), Leman (2007), Grahn & Brett (2007), Tarr et al. (2015). Current reference points for beat entrainment, neural synchronisation, predictive processing, repetition, groove, motor coupling and social synchrony.
Open research status
A complete neuroscientific field study of the Lila that captures music, movement, group, expectation, colour, smell and social role at once does not exist. This is a methodological limit of the field, not a weakness of the material: what can be isolated in the laboratory often loses its context in the ritual.
It therefore remains open how the tipping point from repetition into pull can be described without reducing it to physiology. For artistic research this becomes a practical question: how can repetition be composed so that it enables intensification but does not tip into manipulation, overwhelm or mere effect?