Effects of tempo, swing density, and listener's drumming experience, on swing detection thresholds for drum rhythms

Abstract

Swing, a popular technique in music performance, has been said to enhance the "groove" of the rhythm. Swing works by delaying the onsets of even-numbered subdivisions of each beat (e.g., 16th-note swing delays the onsets of the second and fourth 16th-note subdivisions of each quarter-note beat). The "swing magnitude" (loosely speaking, the amount of delay) is often quite small. And there has been little investigation, using musical stimuli, into what swing magnitudes listeners can detect. To that end, this study presented continually-looped electronic drum rhythms, with 16th-note swing in the hi-hat on every other bar, to drummers and non-drummers. Swing magnitude was adjusted using a staircase procedure, to determine the magnitude where the difference between swinging and not-swinging bars was just-noticeable. Different tempi (60 to 140 quarter-notes per minute) and swing densities (how often notes occurred at even-numbered subdivisions) were used. Results showed that all subjects could detect smaller swing magnitudes when swing density was higher, thus confirming a previous speculation that the perceptual salience of swing increases with swing density. The just-noticeable magnitudes of swing for drummers differed from those of non-drummers, in terms of both overall magnitude and sensitivity to tempo, thus prompting questions for further exploration.

Spectral consistency in sound sequence affects perceptual accuracy in discriminating subdivided rhythmic patterns

“…The result suggests that timbre affects discrimination accuracy regardless of the rhythmic pattern. The discrimination threshold of swing ratio in straight rhythm is around 10 ms according to the previous study [4,22], which is roughly consistent with the present study. However, discrimination accuracy in rhythmic patterns of various subdivision remained unclear.…”

“…A study reported 6.2 ms displacement in the isochronous tone sequence with 130 ms intervals (corresponding to 260 ms IBI in our case) as a just-noticeable difference [10]. Another study estimated the threshold for discriminating swing from straight rhythms to be approximately 18 ms for 300-ms IBI [19]. We roughly estimated the thresholds in our data as interval ratios crossing 25% and 75% of the fitted curves.…”

Rhythmic Prototypes Across Cultures

“…The difference between 58:42 and 4:3 ratios would amount to only about four milliseconds per interval at the given periodicity (290:210 ms versus 286:214 ms). While we did not test discrimination, studies on the JND for ''swing ratio'' differences in two-interval rhythms strongly suggest that this difference would not be discernible (Frane & Shams, 2017;Friberg & Sundström, 2002). For the sake of simplicity, we thus refer to the 58:42 target ratio as ''4:3.''…”

Spectral consistency in sound sequence affects perceptual accuracy in discriminating subdivided rhythmic patterns

“…A study reported 6.2 ms displacement in the isochronous tone sequence with 130 ms intervals (corresponding to 260 ms IBI in our case) as a just-noticeable difference [ 10 ]. Another study estimated the threshold for discriminating swing from straight rhythms to be approximately 18 ms for 300-ms IBI [ 23 ]. We roughly estimated the thresholds in our data as interval ratios crossing 25% and 75% of the fitted curves.…”