Berlin 2018 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 81: Nonlinear Dynamics, Synchronization, Chaos II
DY 81.8: Talk
Friday, March 16, 2018, 12:00–12:15, BH-N 243
The Nature of Microtiming Deviations in Musical Performances — Mathias Sogorski1,2, •Theo Geisel1,2, and Viola Priesemann1,2 — 1Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen — 2Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen
Musical rhythms performed by humans typically show temporal fluctuations. While they have been characterized in simple rhythmic tasks in laboratory settings, 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.