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Correlated microtiming deviations in jazz and rock music
Mathias Sogorski1,2, Theo Geisel1,3,2, Viola Priesemann1,3
1Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany.
Plos One
|January 25, 2018
Summary
Human musical performances exhibit temporal fluctuations. Jazz music shows greater microtiming variability than rock/pop, revealing distinct rhythmic strategies in joint musical performances.
Area of Science:
- Music Cognition
- Computational Musicology
- Rhythm and Timing
Background:
- Human musical performance inherently involves temporal fluctuations.
- Previous studies characterized these fluctuations in simple tasks, but complex joint performances remain less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the nature of temporal fluctuations in complex, multi-musician joint performances.
- To compare rhythmic variability between jazz and rock/pop genres.
Main Methods:
- Developed a semi-automated workflow to extract cymbal beat onsets from over 100 jazz and rock/pop recordings with millisecond precision.
- Analyzed inter-beat interval (IBI) time series using power spectral density analysis to identify correlated processes.
Main Results:
- Identified two distinct long-range correlated processes in IBI time series, characterized by power laws.
- One process on short timescales (< 8 beats) reflects microtiming variability; the other on longer timescales reflects tempo variations.
- Jazz recordings exhibited significantly higher short-timescale variability compared to rock/pop, indicating genre-specific microtiming strategies.
Conclusions:
- Musical genres utilize distinct microtiming strategies, with jazz employing greater variability within measures.
- Findings elucidate principles of rhythmic performance and offer insights for artificial music generation algorithms.
- This study bridges the gap between simple rhythmic tasks and complex, expressive musical performances.
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