The Psychology of Extreme Rhythms

so music psychologists have this wonderful term that they call the indifference interval it can refer to music which feels neither too fast nor too slow it's the most average music possible it's the goldilocks tempo it's the ph-7 of music it's at about 100 beats per minute or roughly a beat occurring once every 600 milliseconds it's different from person to person but what's so fascinating about this indifference interval is that it also corresponds to your walking speed how fast it feels most natural to just walk down the street at a comfortable pace if you want to really feel it take out a metronome and try walking at different tempos first at the indifference interval of about 100 bpm see how that feels then speed it up to a faster musical tempo like maybe 180 bpm it's gonna feel a lot more chaotic and frantic like music at 180 beats per minute like drum and bass music if you slowed it down to say 60 beats per minute the speed of a slow and lingerous jazz ballad you're gonna really feel that slow tempo in your lingerous gate so your feeling of fastness and slowness as you listen to music corresponds to the fastness and slowness of your walking gate what's interesting here is if you slow your walking gait down to a certain point you'll stop feeling it as a rhythm you like kind of awkwardly try and time out leg movements and the distribution of weight will be really weird if you're doing it too slow it won't feel like walking and it won't feel like music either at those tempos it will be impossible to feel the groove and so there are hard limits to how fast and how slow our brains and bodies can process music not play music not perform music but how they can process music let's talk about rhythmic thresholds [Music] this video was brought to you by stream and my streaming service nebula where you can watch an extended version of this music theory video [Music] liminal is an adjective that is used to describe the uneasy feeling of being at the threshold between two states of being it's a word that the internet loves to describe spaces liminal spaces god does the internet love liminal spaces this music was written using what i'm going to call liminal rhythm which is music that has that uneasy feeling being at the threshold of walking too slow [Music] it's a tune called threshold by my band sungazer and we've been using it as kind of an experiment of sorts this summer as we've been touring we were very curious to see how audiences might entrain how they might move their bodies to this music how might they headbang how might they groove and the results have been interesting because different people seem to feel it different ways in different cities it's the same music why the difference well a couple years ago i made some videos talking about the fastest possible music and the slowest possible music which turns out to be about 33 beats per minute at least as cited by paul price in the psychology of time this is what 33 beats per minute sounds like played on a drum set it's hard but not impossible to connect these beats together in your brain in a process that's called subjective rhythmization you're hearing a strong beat and you're hearing a weak beat if this was any slower this might be very difficult if not impossible to do like walking might be so all you got to do just gotta count to four we swear there's no tricks there is no trick just gonna try and count to four together three [Music] four we found when playing live is that getting a whole audience to count to four in this tempo makes it so it's actually relatively easy to feel that on and off pattern which might suggest that in a large group of people you could actually lower the limit for rhythmic perception you can make music which is even slower because the larger group will be able to feel it on mass more this is total conjecture but i thought that was kind of a cool idea maybe next time but anyway on one end of the spectrum this music is in 4-4 but why does it sound so fast and frantic there's a fastest possible music too how fast our brains can process subdivisions and usually this is pegged at about 100 milliseconds or 10 notes per second yes you can play faster than that i i know you can that's good for you but our brains have a hard time understanding what's going on faster than 10 notes per second for example check out these two piano bleeps bleep one and bleep two in the first example the notes were separated by 50 milliseconds and in the second example the notes were separated by 40 milliseconds that's a 20 difference in speed between the two of them now i don't know about you but i have a hard time telling the difference between the two examples the just noticeable difference between the two is very high compare it to these beliefs example one and example two in the first example the notes were separated by 500 milliseconds and in the second example they were separated by 400 milliseconds the same percent difference as in the earlier bleeps but i don't know it was just a lot easier to tell the difference for me so if you want your brain and other brains to notice the differences between rhythms it doesn't really do you any good to play faster than 100 milliseconds which is cited as the fastest possible subdivision yes of course you can play faster than that but as we heard your brain has trouble keeping up sungazers drummer sean crowder and i talked a lot about what these thresholds might mean in our music what it might mean to play music that's both ridiculously fast and ridiculously slow at the same time when you play 10 notes per second at 33 beats per minute you get a subdivision of a little bit more than 18 notes per beat which we just rounded up to 19 notes per beat this is what you might call a 19 tablet the beat has been divided into 19 evenly spaced pulses which is ridiculous a 19 tuplet it is it is the most the most tuplet 19 of them sean crowder has a video out now on his channel you can check out where he talks all about these hyper tuplets or high resolution tuplets but you could also just think of this as a really fast 1916. [Music] [Music] now something is both insanely fast and insanely slow we run into the danger of people not knowing what to do with it not knowing how to move but what's very interesting is people fell into a third category one which related back to the indifference interval you see when you divide 19 into groupings of six plus six plus seven you get a groove which sounds like this you're hearing three almost even pulses in the kick drum it's kind of like 3 4 except that last beat is just a little bit longer it's 100 milliseconds longer [Music] [Music] because of that you can kind of just groove along to the whole thing in three four even if it's not actually in three four that's kind of what the audience was doing you can see them moving as if it's in this three except that third beat is a little bit longer than the others i kind of feel it the same in uh threshold i feel like in three when i do the delay stuff at tap tempo in the three [Music] but i try to mess with because it's not really in three if you take 33 beats per minute that 4 4 pulse and divide it into three you get 99 bpm very close to the indifference interval of 100 beats per minute the tempo which feels not too fast and not too slow it's something that you can really latch on to and groove too so in the tune we have three concepts in music psychology that correspond with different tempos and time signatures we have the low rhythmic threshold of 33 bpm going by in 4 4 we have the indifference interval of roughly 100 beats per minute going by in a lopsided 3 4 and we have the upper rhythmic threshold of 100 milliseconds whizzing by in 19 tuplets or 1916. you know threshold is a piece of music that you can feel many different ways and they're all right it kind of calls into question what a time signature even is and what its value is for us and for me a time signature is a means to an end and it isn't the music itself it's a means of playing the music but it's also a lens through which you can understand movement how you might move to a given piece of music how you might entrain to the pulse it's all in 4-4 man yeah i'm just feeling it man just feel it and feel it stop thinking about it feel that's how you do it kids now we certainly aren't the first people to use liminality as a framework for composition in fact that's the name of the doctoral thesis that we got this from from steve layman sean and i initially wrote this tune threshold as a kind of an experiment a way of writing music that was both too fast and too slow at the same time but this tune has kind of taken on new meaning in the past year we've been thinking a lot about time and the relationship of people to each other in time because the past year has radically altered the collective consciousness and how time works for us as people and also as musicians time works differently rhythm is just fundamentally all about events in time and music is about how we experience time how we experience the relationship between events the passage of time and god for me does the passage of time feel very different now than it ever did in my entire life and so playing this tune threshold all about being in the perceptual present in such a specific way night after night two crowds of people counting to four together has kind of given me a better appreciation of time and my relationship to it it's been weirdly therapeutic honestly [Applause] [Music] by the way we have an album coming out on october 11th called perihelion threshold is one of ten tracks each of them has a crazy rhythmic idea behind it and we haven't even talked about the bridge yet you're curious about the bridge where i'm playing the like ding ding-ding jazz oh bridge you had to bring up the bridge if you want to learn a little bit more about liminal rhythm and watch me rant a little bit more about the perceptual present there is an extended version of this video available exclusively on nebula nebula is my streaming service where you can find all kinds of extended versions of my videos and bonus content as well as the bonus content of many of your favorite youtube educational creators like lindsay ellis 12 tone legal eagle wendover productions up and atom and many many more it's a great place to watch and discover quality content ad-free from people that you care about and content that hopefully matters to you nebula and this video are made possible by another fantastic streaming service curiosity stream the go-to place on the internet for the very best documentaries with thousands of titles to choose from including inside of virtuoso's brain a fascinating look at the neuroscience of music and virtuosity you can sign up for both curiosity stream and nebula by clicking the link in the description or going to curiositystream.com adamnelly and when you do you can get both streaming services for a year for just 14.79 or just a little bit more than a dollar a month by clicking the link in the description or this link here you're not only supporting this channel but all of the creators over on nebula as we create a platform that aims to engage the world in a more meaningful way thank you everybody for watching and until next time [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 587,790

Rating: 4.9691577 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: DRLTjESyuQk

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021