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Swing it 1 hour3/31/2023 ![]() But this feature alone is not sufficient for swing, as jazz musicians know it can even be produced easily by a computer. ![]() Merely the alternation of eighth notes played at unequal lengths, so-called "downbeats" and "offbeats," are an easily perceivable component of swing. Although the swing feel is one of the most important characteristics of jazz, for a long time it was believed that swing could be felt but not explained. The term was introduced by jazz musicians to denote a specific performance style they considered essential for jazz. "What is this thing called swing?" Louis Armstrong already asked in one of his songs. These microtiming deviations are so small that they are not perceived as such even by professional jazz musicians, who nonetheless are using them unconsciously. In their study now published in Communications Physics, they were able to demonstrate that certain systematic deviations in timing are a key component of swing. With a sophisticated experiment and data analyses on more than 450 well-known jazz solos, physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) together with psychologists from the University of Göttingen have unraveled a secret of swing. ![]() However, even 100 years after the beginnings of jazz, it is still unclear what exactly constitutes the swing feel. Jazz must swing-jazz musicians agree on that. This procedure creates downbeat delays of 85 ticks for the soloist without changing the soloist's swing ratio, but increases the swing ratio of the rhythm section. Finally, in the “downbeat delayed” version (brown background), additionally, the offbeats of the rhythm section are synchronized with the offbeats of the soloist. In the “both delayed” version (red background), all notes of the soloist are delayed by 85 ticks. In the “quantized original” version (green background) underlying all further manipulations, the microtiming deviations of the soloist's original performance are suppressed and the notes are aligned with the grid. Black notes and gray notes denote timing positions of soloist and rhythm section, respectively, in the different manipulations. The dashed line shows the position of the offbeats corresponding to a chosen “optimal” swing-ratio, referred to as r opt in the upper-left frame. Full lines represent exact quarter note positions (metronome beats). Importantly, all manipulations were done so as to keep the same swing ratio for the soloist (i.e., piano). Schematic representation of the timing manipulations we used in the experiment to probe the effects of microtiming deviations on the swing feel. ![]()
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