Perception and Evaluation of Timing Patterns in Drum Ensemble Music from Mali

Abstract

Polak’s (2010) chronometric analyses of Malian jembe music suggested that the characteristic “feel” of individual pieces rests upon nonisochronous subdivisions of the beat. Each feel is marked by a specific pattern of two or three different subdivisional pulses—these being either short, medium, or long. London (2010) called the possibility of more than two different pulse classes into question on psychological and theoretical grounds. To shed light on this issue, 23 professional Malian percussionists and dancers were presented with timing-manipulated phrases from a piece of Malian drumming music called “Manjanin.” In a pairwise comparison experiment, participants were asked: (1) if the items of each pair were same or different, and (2) if different, which of the two was the better example of the characteristic rhythm of Manjanin. While most contrastive pairs were well distinguished and produced clear preference ratings, participants were unable to distinguish short-medium-long patterns from short-long-long patterns, and both were preferred to all other manipulations. This supports London’s claim that, perceptually, there are only two pulse classes. We discuss further implications of these findings for music theory, involving beat subdivision, tempo effects, microtiming, and expressive variation, as well as methodological issues.

Rhythmic Prototypes Across Cultures

“…These are highly stable across a wide range of rhythms, tempo changes, instruments, performances, and performers (Polak, 2010;Polak & London, 2014) and afford precise ensemble entrainment (Polak, Jacoby, & London, 2016). Neuhoff, Polak, and Fischinger (2017) found that timing patterns based on these complex ratios were well discriminated and aesthetically preferred by Malian expert musicians and dancers over both isochronous versions and complex ratios that were foreign to their repertoire. Here, we ask whether musicians' perception and production prototypes co-vary with the prominent occurrence of corresponding rhythms characteristic of their music-cultural environments.…”

“…While such ratios prevail in some pieces of repertoire, ratios of about 2:1 prevail in others, and both types of rhythm afford equally reliable and precise ensemble synchronization (Polak et al, 2016). Moreover, the more complex ratios are well discriminated and aesthetically preferred by Malian musicians for those pieces that do feature them in performance (Neuhoff et al, 2017). The relativist hypothesis thus would predict that a ratio somewhere around 4:3 (% 57:43) may constitute a culture-specific prototype for Malian musicians' categorical rhythm perception (see Figure 1, blue triangle in lower tier).…”

The Paradox of Isochrony in the Evolution of Human Rhythm

“…Some North-American Indian, Javanese Gamelan, and Western electro-acoustic traditions exhibit no isochrony at all, but it might be argued that they do not fulfill reasonable definitions of music. For comparisons of timing in different musical cultures, see ( Arom, 1991 ; Polak et al, 2016 ; Neuhoff et al, 2017 ). Although humans are cognitively biased toward isochrony in music ( Ravignani et al, 2016a ; Fitch, 2017 ), this bias is apparently modulated by enculturation ( Jacoby and McDermott, 2017 , though see Bowling et al, 2017 ).…”

Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners’ attitudes

“…This idea was promoted in a scholarly context by Keil [ 18 , 40 , 44 , 45 ]. A series of studies in ethnomusicology, jazz, and popular music research showed that context-specific microtiming patterns were ubiquitous in performed jazz [ 46 – 49 ], Cuban music [ 50 ], Brazilian music [ 51 – 53 ], Norwegian folk music [ 54 ], Malian drumming [ 55 – 57 ], R&B, hip hop, electronic dance music [ 58 ] and in drumset playing [ 59 – 61 ]. Several empirical studies investigated the effect of microtiming on the groove experience.…”