Fernando Benadon

How Hooker found his boogie: a rhythmic analysis of a classic groove

This article closely analyses the rhythmic components in John Lee Hooker’s boogie. We show how Hooker recasts a signature riff from a ternary to a binary beat subdivision, paving the way for the triple-to-duple shift that characterised mid-century American popular music. Further, we attribute the boogie’s ‘hypnotic’ feel to two psychoacoustic phenomena: stream segregation and temporal order misjudgement. Stream segregation occurs when the musical surface is divided by the listener into two or more auditory entities (streams), usually as a result of timbral and registral contrasts. In Hooker’s case, these contrasts occur between the guitar groove’s downbeats and upbeats, whose extreme proximity also blurs their temporal order. These expressive effects are complemented by global and gradual accelerandos that envelop Hooker’s early performances.

Dynamic Exploration of Recording Sessions between Jazz Musicians over Time

We present a new system for exploring, in an intuitive and interactive way, a large compendium of data about collaborations between jazz musicians. The system consists of an easy-to-use web application that marries an ego-network view of collaborations with an interactive timeline. We develop a new measure of collaboration strength that is used to highlight strong and weak collaborations in the network view. The ego-network is arranged using a novel algorithm for ordering nodes that avoids occlusion even when the network is frequently changing. Finally, the system is applied to a large, unique, hand-curated data set of recorded jazz collaborations. The system can be accessed at http://mapofjazz.com/socialcom.

Speech Rhythms and Metric Frames

I present some conceptual and computational tactics related to the metric analysis of speech rhythms. An utterance can be considered metered when it approaches isochrony at the level of the syllable (note) and/or foot (beat). Since the timing patterns of spoken speech resemble those of music, we can apply knowledge of musical meter and expressive timing to the study of speech. However, speech rhythms tend to be more amorphous than musical rhythms, which makes the task of modeling meter in speech far from straightforward. The lack of a score or implicit rhythmic template leads to a meter-finding methodology that juggles the oftentimes incompatible outcomes of different metric frameworks: quantization as opposed to categorical perception, and subdivision isochrony as opposed to beat isochrony.

Metrical perception of trisyllabic speech rhythms

The perception of duration-based syllabic rhythm was examined within a metrical framework. Participants assessed the duration patterns of four-syllable phrases set within the stress structure XxxX (an Abercrombian trisyllabic foot). Using on-screen sliders, participants created percussive sequences that imitated speech rhythms and analogous non-speech monotone rhythms. There was a tendency to equalize the interval durations for speech stimuli but not for non-speech. Despite the perceptual regularization of syllable durations, different speech phrases were conceived in various rhythmic configurations, pointing to a diversity of perceived meters in speech. In addition, imitations of speech stimuli showed more variability than those of non-speech. Rhythmically skilled listeners exhibited lower variability and were more consistent with vowel-centric estimates when assessing speech stimuli. These findings enable new connections between meter- and duration-based models of speech rhythm perception.

Quantitative analysis of temporal structure in Cuban guaguancó drumming

We examine the temporal properties of cyclical drumming patterns in an expert performance of Afro-Cuban rumba recorded in Santiago de Cuba. Quantitative analysis of over 9,000 percussion onsets collected from custom sensors placed on various instruments reveals different types and degrees of rhythmic variation across repetitions of each of five characteristic guaguancó patterns (clave, cascara, quinto, segundo, and tumba). We assess each instrument’s variability using principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling, complementing our quantitative exploration with insights from music theory. Through these methods, we uncover details of timing that are insufficiently conveyed with standard music notation in order to shed light on the role of improvised variation in solo and accompaniment ensemble roles.