Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 8: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Formation II

SOE 8.3: Talk

Monday, April 1, 2019, 17:45–18:00, H17

It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing: Unraveling a Musical Mystery by Scientific Means? — •George Datseris^{1, 2}, Annika Ziereis³, Thorsten Albrecht³, York Hagmayer³, Viola Priesemann^{1, 2}, and Theo Geisel^{1, 2} — ¹Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization — ²Department of Physics, Georg-August-University Goettingen — ³Georg-Elias-Mueller Institute for Psychology, Georg-August-University Goettingen

The so-called swing feeling in jazz performances has puzzled musicologists and jazz critics for decades. For a long time it was believed that one can feel it, but one cannot explain it. More recently discussions focused on the role of microtiming deviations (MTDs, temporal deviations below the phrase level); some musicologists have claimed that they are essential for the swing feeling.

Our group has analyzed these MTDs in detail and found e.g. differences between swinging jazz and rock/pop music on time scales typically below 2 bars. Moreover, to answer whether they are relevant for the swing feeling we carried out an online survey using jazz recordings in which we had systematically manipulated MTDs - exaggerating, deleting, and inverting them. We found that the presence of microtiming deviations is not essential for the "swing" feeling as versions without microtiming deviations were preferred, in contrast to the common belief of many musicians and musicologists.