This BPM is trash, and here's why
Added 2022-02-18 04:46:13 +0000 UTCBig ol' video essay on clearly one of the most pressing subjects - tempos with decimal points in them. We talk a lot about perception and notation, and why 114.57 is a trash BPM.
Love y'all!
Adam
Comments
As for the “threatening” part… So many feels. Thorough fheels. It triggered what we call «fou rire», this deep, self-sustaining laughter. Also, tears in my eyes at the insight. Music is what the world needs right now.
Alexandre Enkerli
2022-02-26 03:18:21 +0000 UTCThank you for being you! Including on Nebula, where we love your work. Without comments. Coming late to this specific party (7:47?). Were I to teach ethnomusicology, again, this semester, I’d assign this video so we could discuss it in class. Reminds me of our famed Transcription & Analysis class, at IU Bloomington. Almost a rite of passage. And a deep learning experience. JND’s pretty important, including in pitch. Some people in the Xenharmonic scene are adamant that decimal cents are primordial when you work through any kind of microtuning. Yet the significance of tuning systems comes from usage, which typically comes to perception which is itself in much wider ranges of values (2¢ is already a pretty narrow difference to perceive). There’s a huge difference between having an abstract system in our minds (“competence”, in Chomsky’s parlance) and a way to put those things in practice. The latter is called “performance” and it’s where things get interesting, if you ask me. “Performance Theory” (especially from Dick Bauman, also IUB) tends to apply to verbal art. Sure works well for musicking, including with dudes like Charlie Keil and Steve Feld. “Participatory Discrepancies” in MusicGrooves.org (ca. 2007). At any rate, thanks for your work… and, again, thanks for being you.
Alexandre Enkerli
2022-02-26 02:59:55 +0000 UTC
