In 1931, Duke Ellington and Irving Mills dedicated a song to the phenomenon of swing, which they called “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” Yet, to this day, the question of what, exactly, makes a jazz performance swing has not really been clarified. A team drawn from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen and the University of Göttingen recently carried out an empirical study into the role played by microtiming in this process—a topic that has hitherto been controversial among music experts and musicologists. Experts refer to tiny deviations from a precise rhythm as “microtiming deviations.” The project team has now clarified the role of microtiming deviations for the “swing feel” using digital jazz piano recordings with manipulated microtiming that were rated by 160 professional and amateur musicians with respect to the swing feel.
Click here for original story, The role of temporal fluctuations for the swing feel in jazz music
Source: Phys.org