Abstract
Musical rhythms performed by humans typically show temporal fluctuations. While they have been characterized in simple rhythmic tasks, it is an open question what is the nature of temporal fluctuations, when several musicians perform music jointly in all its natural complexity. To study such fluctuations in over 100 original jazz and rock/pop recordings played with and without metronome we developed a semi-automated workflow allowing the extraction of cymbal beat onsets with millisecond precision. Analyzing the inter-beat interval (IBI) time series revealed evidence for two long-range correlated processes characterized by power laws in the IBI power spectral densities. One process dominates on short timescales (t < 8 beats) and reflects microtiming variability in the generation of single beats. The other dominates on longer timescales and reflects slow tempo variations. Whereas the latter did not show differences between musical genres (jazz vs. rock/pop), the process on short timescales showed higher variability for jazz recordings, indicating that jazz makes stronger use of microtiming fluctuations within a measure than rock/pop. Our results elucidate principles of rhythmic performance and can inspire algorithms for artificial music generation. By studying microtiming fluctuations in original music recordings, we bridge the gap between minimalistic tapping paradigms and expressive rhythmic performances.
Highlights
The art of creating music involves a balance of surprise and predictability. This balance needs to be achieved on many scales, and for many musical components like melody, dynamics, and rhythm
A first evidence for this hypothesis was provided by Voss and Clarke [6], who identified long-range correlations (LRCs) in pitch and loudness fluctuations
The LRCs in both settings have similar characteristics, their origin may be very different: When a piece of music is performed, it has structure on all scales, from motifs, phrases and themes to verses and movements. This structure is reflected in the tempo and is likely to underlie the observed long-range correlations
Summary
The art of creating music involves a balance of surprise and predictability This balance needs to be achieved on many scales, and for many musical components like melody, dynamics, and rhythm. Such a balance is believed to be essential for making music interesting and appealing [1,2,3,4,5]. LRCs were found in the rhythmic structure of Western classical music compositions [2], i.e. in written notations, where the rhythm is represented in a metrically organized precise fashion.
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