Conference Agenda

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.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, neo-soul has been associated with the term “groove” by creators and critics alike (Thompson 2022, 2020; Touré 2000; Ratliff 2000; Pareles 1999). In describing “On & On” by Erykah Badu, the “Queen of Neo-Soul” (AllAfrica 2012), Pareles highlights the “slow, undulating groove and the way its melody rippled down with light syncopations” (1997, 20). Within academia, groove has been characterized as the pleasurable physical experience of moving to music (Etani et al. 2024; Duman et al. 2024; Witek 2017; Janata et al. 2012), though the physical movements detailed are limited. In a different approach, I explore how groove is embodied in six live videos of Badu’s “On & On,” demonstrating how the coordination of the singer’s physical movements and sound enhances aspects of musical structure and lyrical meaning. Following Sterbenz (2017), I observe bodily movements as shapes in time and attend to sympathetic affective sensations that involve tension, relaxation, and the effort of creating movement.

I first examine the relationship between movement, rhythm, and meter by showing two measures of music where Badu’s right arm/hand gestures outward to the audience and reaches the highest heights on downbeats in an entrained gesture. Since such entrained motions do not align with precise isochronous beats, I draw on Danielsen’s theory of “beat bins” and extended beats (2010) to explain how the heights of Badu’s arm movements embody metrical accents in wide beat bins. Observing movement-music interactions also reveals Badu’s embodied text painting of verse lyrics. In one example, Badu regularly makes two motions that I dub “circling” and “relaxed-shrug” throughout verses. Badu’s consistent choreographed motions throughout the song and across multiple performances suggest that embodied storytelling motions are integral to live performance. Using Laban’s movement analysis terminology (1950), I trace the effort of Badu’s movements throughout four full performances, noting different approaches in movement to the verse-chorus form. By analyzing weight, time, space, and flow in movements I detail the ways in which Badu expresses form through shifting efforts.

Recent scholarship on microtiming has suggested that very slight deviations from isochrony at the subdivision level may help musicians disambiguate metrically malleable passages (Polak 2010, London 2012). Colombian currulao frequently uses one particularly ambiguous pattern known as dosillo (“duple”), which is understood by musicians to be made up of four isochronous onsets. While the genre is conventionally considered to be in 6/8, many musicians unfamiliar with the genre have expressed their confusion over dosillo’s metric construal (Hernández 2010, 257), while even the most celebrated currulao musicians fondly refer to dosillo as “the rhythmic venom of the genre” (Candelario 2021, 37:54), arguing that musicians use its four isochronous onsets to trick listeners into perceiving a simple duple meter instead of a compound duple one. In this paper, I argue that despite its perception as an essentially isochronous pattern, very slight timing differences between the inter-onset intervals of dosillo may subconsciously help performers and enculturated listeners disambiguate the pattern, while contributing to the overall groove of the genre.

I analyze timing patterns in dosillo in eight of Grupo Naidy’s tracks, found in two of their albums, for a total of over five hundred data points. In these, I find that the third of the four dosillo onsets is generally about 20ms longer than the other three, and find additional idiosyncrasies between different marimba players who perform in the various tracks. A larger corpus study involving several currulao ensembles and many archival and commercial recordings (1963-present) is underway, the results of which trace dosillo and its microtiming across different performers and time periods, therefore providing a genealogy of the pattern’s stylistic microtiming. This will show how musicians may have used dosillo’s very slight irregularity as a disambiguating element, while contributing to growing scholarship on groove-based music and the types of non-isochrony found therein.