The Asymmetrical Influence of Timing Asynchrony of Bass Guitar and Drum Sounds on Groove

Abstract

Groove is a pleasant feeling that compels people to move their bodies along with music. In the past, there was some consensus among both musicians and researchers that the main factor in inducing this feeling is onset asynchrony of sounds. However, recent studies have asserted that no-asynchrony is the condition that will obtain the highest groove. The current study examined whether no-asynchrony exclusively elicits the highest groove. In Experiment 1, we measured the groove increment of a backbeat drum pattern as a function of the asynchronies between bass guitar and hi-hat cymbal sounds. Upon evaluation, the scores of no conditions exceeded those of the synchronous condition. However, the condition with slight bass guitar precedence over the hi-hat achieved an approximately equal score to the condition with complete synchrony, and that score was higher than the ones achieved with bass delay. In Experiment 2, we measured the participants’ sensitivities to timing discrimination. The results confirmed that the amount of bass precedence in Experiment 1 was perceptible to the listeners. These findings suggest that complete synchronization is not always the best condition to achieve groove and that listeners prefer perceivable asynchronies in some cases.

Rhythmic Density Affects Listeners' Emotional Response to Microtiming

“…Contrasting with these results, Matsushita and Nomura ( 2016 ), in their first experiment, measured a significant effect of the time Shift between bass and drums. The effect might be explained by the sheer magnitude of the displacements in their experiment: at maximum asynchrony, the instruments' onsets were 62.50 ms apart, which is more than double the magnitude used in the other studies.…”

“…Matsushita and Nomura ( 2016 ) proceeded according to the Shift method. They used the same standard rock/pop drum pattern as Frühauf et al ( 2013 ), but combined it with repeated eighth notes on a bass guitar.…”

“…The analysis was carried out separately for each of the two timing manipulation methods ( Shift, Disturbance ). The inclusion of quadratic regression coefficients was based on previous results that parabola-shaped regression models appear to best approximate this kind of data (see Frühauf et al, 2013 ; Matsushita and Nomura, 2016 ), compared to first-order linear regression models. The between-subjects variables Style ( Funk, Swing ) and Expertise ( Experts, Non-Experts ) did not show any effect on the outcome variables, hence they will be omitted in the Results section of Study A .…”

“…It has considerable support among musicians (Berliner, 1994 ; Monson, 1996 ; Doffman, 2008 ). The empirical evidence concerning the relevance of microtiming for groove, however, has been inconclusive so far: some studies found no evidence that microtiming influences groove (Butterfield, 2010 ; Madison et al, 2011 ; Madison and Sioros, 2014 ), others found that microtiming is detrimental to groove (Davies et al, 2013 ; Frühauf et al, 2013 ; Matsushita and Nomura, 2016 ); yet others found that microtiming patterns arising in competent performance do not affect groove negatively, but if the patterns are exaggerated in magnitude, the groove experience decreases (Kilchenmann and Senn, 2015 ; Senn et al, 2016 ). Finally, Hofmann et al ( 2017 ) suggested that listeners preferred tightened microtiming patterns to the microtiming magnitude of the originally performed music.…”

“…– Study A investigates to what extent the distribution of microtiming deviations across instrumental parts affects listeners' emotional responses. Previous studies have presented two methods for introducing fixed timing displacements into otherwise quantized musical stimuli: one method is to shift the entire parts played by different instruments against each other, for example a bass track against the corresponding drum track (as used in Butterfield, 2010 ; Matsushita and Nomura, 2016 ). The other method consists in displacing events against each other that are played by the same instrument: Frühauf et al ( 2013 ), for example, displaced the snare drum or bass drum events relative to the rest of the drum track.…”