Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Groove Location: Greenway Ballroom E-F Session Chair: Timothy Koozin, University of Houston | |
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A New Quantitative Approach to Headbanging at the Frontiers of Groove Indiana University Some music, such as certain areas of modern jazz and New Music, is saturated with self-consciously complex and intentionally dizzying shifts of meter, rhythmic pattern, and tempo. Other music, such as punk and electronic dance music, has a culture of intense physical participation by listeners at live concerts. Progressive and technical metal is a rare and possibly unique area of musical practice that combines these two traits; bands such as the NYC-based Car Bomb leverage heady, rapidly shifting grooves into explosive live shows replete with headbanging and moshing. In this paper, I present a novel quantitative method for analyzing footage of fans headbanging at a live performance of Car Bomb’s “Lights Out,” a song in which non-nesting guitar patterns are crammed within rapidly shifting apparent tempos cued by changing groupings of the fast underlying pulse. Studying movement to this song, I can begin to untangle Car Bomb’s dual allegiance to movement-inducing groove and to ostensibly stasis-inducing complexity. The method, which involves animating dots to follow headbangers’ motions and then reading the dots’ positions with a computer vision patch in Jitter (Max-MSP), blends the rigor of lab-based music cognition studies of movement to music with the ecological validity of studying movement at an actual concert. I ultimately argue that Car Bomb’s disorienting changes of apparent tempo actually enhance the music’s kinetic appeal, as shown in the way that headbangers re-sync their motion with greater amplitude after being temporarily thrown off by surprising shifts. | |