Summary

For my Ph.D. midway assessment, I will be presenting an overview of three recently completed experiments that investigated the expressive means with which musicians use to achieve different (micro-)timing ‘feels’ typically found in groove-based music. Here, drummers, guitarists and bassists were asked to perform a pattern in three different timing styles: a) Laid-back, b) Pushed, and c) On-beat, relative to an isochronous timing reference. Onset​, duration, sound-pressure level (SPL) and spectral centroid (SC) information were extracted from the recorded audio of each instrument and submitted to statistical tests of difference (ANOVA/Friedman). Several main effects of timing style on​ various sound features were found for each instrumentalist group, showing that musicians systematically manipulated sound features, in addition to onset, in order to produce different timing feels. These findings are in accord with previous research (Danielsen et al. 2015) and lend further evidence to the hypothesis that both temporal and sound-related features are important in order to signal the intended timing of a rhythmic event.