Within analytical and perceptual literature on groove in popular music, time-based elements like rhythm, meter, and micro-timing receive an overwhelming amount of focus. This is logical, since researchers are generally interested in characterizing time-based structures that consistently elicit enjoyable, synchronized body movement, compared to those that tend to not. However, focusing solely on musical time does not allow researchers to consider any groove in its entirety. By removing grooves from their instrumental contexts, researchers transform them into rhythms. However, timbre influences rhythmic perception and changing timbre and orchestration affects “grooviness,” both as rated by listeners (Sioros et al. 2022) and as demonstrated by dance (Zeiner-Henriksen 2010).

Although this evidence strongly suggests that timbre and orchestration should be incorporated into groove analyses, the most common analytical approaches tend to either reduce a groove to a rhythm (Witek et al., 2014ab, Madison et al. 2009, Ohriner 2019) or ignore pitched elements (Stupacher et al. 2018, Senn et al. 2016). Studies that foreground instrumentation and texture (Danielsen 2006, Butler 2006) tend not to synthesize these parameters’ relationships nor discuss trends. There is thus a gap between empirical evidence and analytical practice: timbre and orchestration are clearly important components of groove, but a systematic, replicable means of accounting for these parameters in groove analysis is absent.

I aim to bridge this gap with a new method for incorporating timbre and orchestration into groove analysis. I begin by transcribing grooves in their full orchestration and analyzing the metrical contributions, cyclic contributions, and textural functions of each groove. I then characterize the grooves’ constituent timbres using the TimbreToolbox software in MATLAB. I analyze each sound’s spectral, temporal-envelope, and periodicity characteristics. Then, I conduct principal component analysis (PCA) on these data to facilitate comparison between sounds. I then plot the sounds in 3D-PCA space. Sounds near each other have similar acoustic structures, and those far from each other are highly contrasting.

The music-theoretical and music-information-retrieval analyses are then synthesized to demonstrate how rhythms are distributed amongst similar and contrasting timbres. These results constitute a groove’s orchestrational profile: a theoretical model and testable hypothesis of groove perception.

French keyboardist DOMi Louna (Domitille Degalle) and American drummer JD BECK (James Dennis Beck) emerged as a contemporary jazz duo in 2018, blending 1960s–70s jazz fusion with hip-hop, R&B, pop, and drum machine/broken-beat genres. Professionally known as DOMi & JD BECK, their music features modal and non-functional harmony, virtuosic rhythmic textures, rapid tempos, and irregular meters.

One striking feature is how meter is an actively negotiated parameter that is frequently reshaped and embellished by BECK’s drum patterns. A central device in this reshaping is the backbeat. The backbeat—a drum set pattern where the snare drum is placed on beats two and four in 4/4 meter—is typically a continuous, foundational rhythmic structure that supports a groove, and appears in a wide variety of genres (e.g., pop, rock, R&B, soul, funk).

Building on the Metric Preference Rules developed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), metric dissonance (Krebs 1999), the conservative/radical hearing framework (Imbrie 1973), and backbeat studies in popular music (Hesselink 2022; Biamonte 2014; Cairns 2022; Hanenberg 2020; Butler 2006), I argue that BECK repurposes backbeats beyond their conventional use: he uses fleeting backbeats to create moments of tension-driven reinterpretations of meter and pulse in short timespans, often without altering the backbeat itself. Analyzing two original songs written by the duo, this paper highlights how BECK adapts the backbeat into a flexible device for localized reinterpretations of meter and pulse in contemporary jazz fusion.

Groove feels good. Its relationship to states of flow, pleasure, and intersubjectivity is well-documented from several disciplinary angles. Yet groove’s rhythmic layers can also be configured in ways that complicate its characteristic sense of flow. Idiosyncratic grooves play an important role in Solange’s 2016 album, A Seat at the Table. The album’s varied grooves serve a clear narrative purpose. Accompanying lyrics and first-person testimony about Black resilience through generations of exploitation in the United States, they sound both the psychic weight of history and the healing power of community. This paper examines the relationship between groove, subjectivity, and narrative in A Seat at the Table, centering “Cranes in the Sky,” the album’s fourth track, as a case study. It analyzes how loops, layers, and textures drive the song’s trajectory from alienation to belonging.

In “Cranes,” uneven loops create enduring rhythmic instability. Yet as the song progresses, its harmony moves from ambiguity to clearer centricity while its textures offer glimmers of the album’s later expressions of community. My analysis first examines how discrepancies in phrase length between layers and the obscuring of downbeats by multilayer syncopation sustain rhythmic ungroundedness. Then I examine how the harmonic environment shifts from competing centricities to a clear grounding in D♭, aligning with a narrative shift toward acceptance. In the third part of my analysis, I elucidate how the song’s accumulation of multitrack vocal layers foreshadows vocal textures later in the album that underline expressions of supportive, joyful community. Meanwhile, the mantra-like repetition and ethereal timbres at the ending of “Cranes,” a nod to Alice Coltrane’s new-age devotional music, bolster the meditative equanimity of the song’s conclusion.

I then contextualize the shifting subjectivities of “Cranes” amidst the larger historical project of A Seat at the Table. The song’s rhythmic disorder evokes the historical moment that inspired it, the leadup to the 2008 recession. But in the album’s longer narrative arc, the groove of “Cranes” sounds the emotional dysregulation of trying to survive in a world made harder by systemic racism, misogyny, and capitalism—and imagines a way forward, toward healing in community.