Correlated microtiming deviations in jazz and rock music

TL;DR

This study analyzes microtiming deviations in jazz and rock music, revealing two long-range correlated processes influencing rhythm variability, with jazz showing more microtiming fluctuations than rock/pop.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-automated workflow for millisecond-precision extraction of cymbal beats and characterizes the long-range correlations in microtiming fluctuations across genres.

Findings

Jazz exhibits higher microtiming variability than rock/pop.

Two distinct long-range correlated processes govern rhythm fluctuations.

Microtiming variability is more pronounced on short timescales in jazz.

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.