Department of Music Lecture: “Freestyle Skateboarding and Entrainment: Expressing Metric Layers through Tricks” 

Title
“Freestyle Skateboarding and Entrainment: Expressing Metric Layers through Tricks” 

Abstract
Corporeally expressing music’s metric structure is a fundamental characteristic of freestyle skateboarding routines. In preparation for contests, freestyle skateboarders must choose a piece of music, choreograph a two-minute routine to that piece, spend many weeks or months practicing, and perform their choreographed routines in an arena with multiple judges and audience members. The process of internalizing and expressing meter, known as entrainment, requires the listener to coordinate between different layers of periodicity. In this paper, I argue that freestylers articulate a taxonomy of periodic layers—subdivision, tactus, and phrase—through particular classes of maneuvers. I will focus on the music selections and performances by Yuzuki Kawasaki and Mike Osterman—the highest-placed freestylers at the 2019 World Round-Up Freestyle Skateboarding Championships.

Biography
Bryce studies choreography and sound in sport settings. In particular, he examines sporting spaces and events as sites whereby knowledge—both semantic and somatic—is transmitted sonically. Additional research interests include disability studies, popular music, and urban musicology. Prior to graduate study at Washington University in St. Louis, Bryce earned his Master of Music degree in Musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. His master’s thesis, “Freestyle Soundscapes: An Acoustemology of Freestyle Skateboarding Contests,” is an exploration of freestyle skateboarders’ engagement with music and sound during contests as well as the (sub)cultural and gender politics embedded within such sporting spaces.