Legit

A thought on the nature of our perception of legitimacy:

I was tap tap taping away on my desk during class last night, a beat here, a beat there, the usual mindless activity bound to manifest itself during mindless lectures. What i started to notice was this: the beat only sounds out of rhythm, out of beat, out of sync, out of place, if there is no corresponding beats to go along with it. In other words, single beats that break your base beat will sound off. but if you add a pair to that beat a few beats down, and then another the same interval of beats down, your mind legitimizes the initial beat, and it no longer sounds out of place. an example:

- : empty beat
t : taped beat

t---t---t---t---t

above is just a regular interval tap, tap, tap, tap. nothing to fancy. But say you get distracted and end up doing this:

t---t---tt---t---t

if you stopped right there, the beat would be broken. it would sound broken. but if you continued on with this:

t---t---tt---t---t---tt---t---t---tt---t---t---tt---t---t

The beat no longer sounds broken. That may have been a long winded description of a commonly understood phenomenon, but what I got to thinking was that, basically our perception of legitimacy stems from repetition. the more something happens, the more likely we are to accept it as ok. That there, is also a commonly understood concept, but what i found interesting is that according to this oh so scientific example our perception of legitimacy may not be a conscious or even sub conscious event, more likely it is a physiological one. similar to the mechanism that puts a series of sequential frames (images) together into motion as slow as 1 frame / second?