Chechnya has recently banned all music slower than 80 beats per minute and faster
than 116 beats per minute. This anyway from a recent decree
from Chechnya's Cultural Ministry. Now, this might be a little embarrassing
for the Chechnyan Cultural Minister, because the official recording of Russia's
national anthem is slower than this at 76 beats per minute Chechnya's own national anthem is also
slower than this at 78 beats per minute, and perhaps my favorite is that the music that can be found
on the official announcement video declaring this policy on Chechnya's
Cultural Ministry's Telegram, uh, that music is also slower
it's also at 78 beats per minute oh God I love that The way that this whole thing was
reported in the western press was that Chechnya's Cultural Ministry banned
music that was either too fast or too slow which is...kind of true, but... the way that music cognition - the
way that our brains perceive Tempo - and Chechen dance music specifically interact is a little bit more complicated than that. My name is Leigh VanHandle,
I'm associate professor of Music Theory and Music Cognition at
the University of British Columbia. I asked Dr. VanHandle why this Tempo
range of 80 to 116 beats per minute might be considered not too fast or not too slow. There's been a lot of studies about
things like Spontaneous Motor Tempo where if you just ask somebody to
tap at a comfortable tapping rate, they tend to tap around 100 beats per minute. It's the region of what we call Maximal
Pulse Salience, so we're most likely to start hearing a regularly recurring pulse
within those windows as a beat unit. So it would seem, anyway, that the
Chechnyan government just wants people to listen to music within this Goldilocks
Zone that's neither too fast nor too slow. But the problem with that is that Chechnyan
dance music is in fact, extremely fast. There's this very popular dance in Chechnya and the general North Caucasian
region called the Lezginka. Now you can think of the
Lezginka as a dance in 6/8, Where there are six eighth notes with
an accent on the first and the fourth eighth note creating two pairs
of three eighth notes a piece. 1 2 3 4 5 6 But the dance typically happens way
faster than that, check this out, [Music]
that's insane! It's like they're dancing to
Yngvie Malmsteen licks, like... descending sequences in groups of
three but just shredding so fast... I can't do it... [Music] So if we were to assign a BPM to this... this would actually be 240 beats per minute but later on, you know, the kick drum comes in and then the kick drum is playing at
half that rate, so check it out... [Music] In that case, we'd say that the pulse is being
felt in halftime at 120 beats per minute. Still technically illegal, but
that's okay, you can see kadryov, the current leader of Chechnya, dancing
the Lezginka in this video right here, so presumably this dance would be okay
with the Chechnyan Cultural Ministry. I played this recording to Dr VanHandle
to see how she might react to this pulse. yeah once it regularizes, it's there, before I was tapping double time, yeah (When) pulse becomes fast enough,
it actually stops being the pulse, and it starts being a subdivision. It stops being that 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
and it becomes 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and So there's actually different levels
of pulse salience that are going on, and the reason we talk about around 100
beats per minute as being that maximal pulse salience, is because that's
where it's most comfortable for us. You can actually see these different levels
of pulse salience in action when you're watching videos of people clapping
along to the Lezginka on YouTube. Some people clap at the double time,
some people clap at the half time. Two different ways of
interacting with the same music. Because it's a perceptual phenomenon, it
can be different for different people. The Lezginka is a really fast dance - way
faster than house and techno music - but it's usually felt at the halftime, which
better fits our brain's preferred Tempo, and also this 80 to 116 BPM range. Effectively making Kavkaz music
- music from that region - so fast that it becomes slow again. So if something is 160 beats per minute, if
they can make an argument that it's really only half that then, and it's actually
80 beats per minute, then they're good! They're in the sweet spot! So if we take a genre of music
like footwork for example, which regularly reaches 160 beats per minute... you could feel it at the slower 80 BPM,
which falls within this Tempo range. Now Footwork is this fast and exciting form
of hip-hop dancing and music from Chicago, and because of the fancy footwork, it at least bears a passing resemblance to
Caucasian dances like the Lezginka, So in theory footwork should be totally fine... it is a fast dance music that can be felt in
halftime that fits within this tempo range, but of course it it probably won't be. Because in fact the spirit of
this law is a reactionary one. We must bring to the people and
to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral
and ethical standards of life for Chechnya. Now this idea of regulating
music based on specific musical characteristics for the good of
the people...feels downright... Platonic Gracelessness, bad rhythm and disharmony
are akin to bad words and bad character. Now, Plato believed that music has real power over us and people who play
music wield power over others. And so it is the job of
laws to control that power, and make sure that power is only used for good. It turns out to be possible for Melodies with a natural correctness about them
to be given a firm basis in law. If you could somehow grasp what
it was that made them correct, you ought then to have no hesitation
into reducing them to law and system. So if you know music theory...if
you know what makes music good... ...you can make a better society. This seems to be what the Chechnyan
Cultural Ministry has tried to do. Grasp what makes the Lezginka
good, and then legislate around it. The half time pulse of a fast Chechan
dance will fall within this tempo range, but foreign music - which I
guess might make people bad - like techno, house and most forms of pop music does not fall within the spectrum. The problem for the reactionary government
being that footwork...technically does. Now Chechnya is not the only place to try and grasp what makes music good
and then put it into law. In the 1920s, panic around the
moral degeneracy of jazz music led to state and city ordinances
attempting to ban it on technical grounds. For example in Iowa, jazz
music was strictly prohibited, and dances must occur at acceptable tempos. Much like Chechnya today. To combat rave culture in the 1990s, the UK passed
the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, banning public gatherings of amplified
music with "sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of
a succession of repetitive beats." In protest Autechre released the EP anti,
with tracks written to be nonrepeating, recommending that DJs "have a lawyer
and musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the
music in the event of police harassment." By the way, to the best of my research abilities, I'm pretty sure this law still
is on the books in the UK. It's still technically illegal
for crowds of people to gather and listen to music with repetitive beats in the UK. So careful out there, guys. Make sure you have
musicologists present at all times I guess. So all this to say is that
music theory can and has been used as a tool of government
control over musical expression. ...usually controlling dancing like
raving or jazz music for example. So in one way, I kind of sympathize with this
idea of trying to support Chechnyan music, because this stuff, man like it it goes hard [Music] that's fun man I know it's silly party dance music, and I know
there's more options out there - I've included a link to Chechan Music in the description
if you want to check out some more - But in reality, in my experience, if you want
musicians to play a music and support it - pay them! The best way to motivate anybody is to pay
them, and the best way to motivate somebody to spend their life doing something is
to know that there is a future in it. You want to fund state education that promotes
traditional Chechen music and teaches people how to play Chechen music, and then you want to
provide funding for concerts which are there to promote Chechen music, so musicians
know that if they want to study music, they'll have work waiting
for them on the other side. Education and arts funding,
that's how you promote music. Because if you just focus on
banning music that you don't want, people will still play it anyway,
and they'll find ways around it. For example there, is a foreign dance
music that's very popular that's not techno and house music that you might find
yourself having to contend with very soon... Oh Daddy Yankee! This is the question that I've been asking, like, whose job is it going to be in the Chechnyan
government to sit there with like their phone and a metronome app and tap along to
songs and figure out if this is okay... Are we at that point where we can measure beat perception in the brain with
EEG's or anything like that? We're getting there okay we're getting there yeah we can kind of see like the
oscillations that are entraining to particular pulse if we're hearing it okay so yeah I mean are we then going to have
to hook up the Chechnyan Minister with oscillators to figure out how what
what pulse his brain is entraining to? This is clearly a high
priority for everybody to do I don't know maybe?
