Bas de Haas studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at Utrecht
University and two years of jazz guitar at the Utrecht Conservatory.
In 2006 he joined the MCG as an intern.
After a number of different activities within the MCG, Bas decided to
write his masters thesis on the subject of groove and
swing. Parts of the research were presented on the conference of the society
for music perception and cognition (SMPC) in Montreal (Haas &
Honing, 2007). Currently Bas is doing a PhD on music information
retrieval at the Utrecht University.
In music the notion of expressive timing, i.e., deliberately playing behind or before the beat, is very common. The question how expressive timing relates to tempo has been subject to research for quite a while. However, the effect of tempo on timing in jazz and pop performance was only scarcely investigated. This thesis investigates the relation between tempo and expressive timing in groove and swing drumming by analyzing the timing of three well-known professional drummers. Furthermore a model is presented that tries to capture this effect of tempo on expressive timing.
In a controlled experiment three expert drummers were asked to
perform three musical fragments in sixteen repetitions in six
different tempi on a complete midi drum kit. The results show that
expressive timing largely depends on the style and tempo of a drum
groove. In addition, it is found that expressive timing does not
scale proportionally with tempo in a Swing and Funk drumming, but
does scale proportionally with tempo in Shuffle drumming.To model the relation between timing and tempo a knowledge representation is used that separates tempo and expressive timing as different aspects of musical time. The relation between timing and tempo is represented by three swing ratio models which are optimized to fit the newly acquired data.
- Full MSc Thesis (pdf)
- A short article in de Connectie
An audio example of the swing excerpt quantized with a 1:1 swing ratio (mp3), a 2:1 swing ratio (mp3) and a human performance (mp3).
An audio example of the shuffle excerpt quantized with a 1:1 swing ratio (mp3), a 2:1 swing ratio (mp3) and a human performance (mp3).
An audio example of the funk excerpt quantized with a 1:1 swing ratio (mp3) and a human performance (mp3).
Swing ride data (csv)
Shuffle hi-hat data (csv)
Funk hi-hat data (csv)
The data of other drums and cymbals is available on request. Please send an e-mail to bas.dehaas (at) cs.uu.nl.
Honing, H. (1995). The vibrato problem, comparing two solutions. Computer Music Journal, 19(3) 32-49.
Honing, H. (2001). From time to time: The representation of timing and tempo. Computer Music Journal, 35(3), 50-61.
* Free use only for research on condition a reference to one of the publications above and a text like "...data was made available by the Music Cognition Group and can be downloaded from https://www.mcg.uva.nl/haas/" is included. Re-distribution is not allowed.
www.mcg.uva.nl