Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics

[langmick]

This is pretty cool. I've felt these things before, where you take a piece of music as a whole and insert smaller snippets of the whole in the groove. Is some metric modulation fractal in nature? this is probably all saying stuff cost drummers already know. Maybe that's what draws us to studying it.

Nice to see Jeff get some legit science credit!

Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics in a Virtuoso Drum Track of a Popular Music Recording

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127902
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2015/06/secret-groovy-drumming-may-be-math

[MRhet]

I love Jeff. But that song . . . not so much.

Still, very interesting stuff.

Thanks for posting.

[john lamb]

I like the remix better, but the sample would cancel out the results of the study. About that - Porcaro is clearly modulating the "swing" in the different sections of the song for dynamic effect - wise drumming, very well done, but not unusual in the slightest.

And rhythm is undoubtedly fractal in nature - this has been known for undreds of years in technical literature - before the word fractal was known, even. Look up "hypermeter" in music theory texts - you'll find that the metrical rules that apply to a bar of music also apply to phrase structure and even sections of the songs. It scales inwards as well, with subvidision and sub-subdivisions also reflecting basic metrical rules.

The reason for this is already known. Broadly speaking, rhythm results from things that resonate, and harmonics are the speeds that relate to the resonance. This is rhythm with the big R, the kind that is meant when someone speaks of the rhythm of the planets or the rhythm of waves. Oddly enough, we use the right term for it - musical rhythm affects our brain, and the stronger the groove, the stronger the effect. Measurable, repeatable and common sense. (I wrote a book about this a few years ago (A Matter of Time: The Science of Rhythm and the Groove). Fractal science covers aspects of all of the other stuff, so it should cover musical rhythm as well.