He can perform flying changes, which involve tricky shifts of accent.
He has hardly ever lived outside London, he says, when I ask about his shifts of accent.
The Bad Plus is best when it comes to clarifying Stravinsky's rhythmic revolution, Morris takes his cues from that, emphasizing the unpredictable shifts of accent and meter, of pattern.
Mr. Denk, for example, likened Bach's shifting of accents in the contrapuntal interplay between the piano and violin to a kind of "proto-jazz".
The original Ukrainian text of "Shchedryk" used hemiola, a shifting of accents within each measure between 6/8 and 3/4, which is lost in the English translations.
There are frequent shifts of musical accent: sometimes the writing evokes the heftiness of Brahms or Dvorak (although the harmonic language is slightly more prickly than theirs), sometimes a more Impressionistic style.
The rhythm of the stamping is disturbed by Stravinsky's constant shifting of the accent, on and off the beat, before the dance ends in a collapse, as if from exhaustion.
In the last decade or so there has been a shift in the accent of marketing, a new stage of commodification that the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin designated "cultural capitalism".
Thus, long periods of contact with speakers of genuine African tone languages of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan stock may have assisted the historical shift from pitch accent to tone systems in Afro-Asiatic.
"It's all in the ear of the beholder," Dr. Gurd said, meaning that the changes in the components of accent -- pacing, rhythm, intonation and stress -- shift in random ways.
In contrast, PA was able to perceive changes in accents, phonemes and voices normally, but showed a relatively mild deficit of accent identification (associative accent agnosia).
