title: The nature and perception of fluctuations in human musical rhythms.
abstract: Although human musical performances represent one of the most valuable achievements of mankind, the best musicians perform imperfectly. Musical rhythms are not entirely accurate and thus inevitably deviate from the ideal beat pattern. Nevertheless, computer generated perfect beat patterns are frequently devalued by listeners due to a perceived lack of human touch. Professional audio editing software therefore offers a humanizing feature which artificially generates rhythmic fluctuations. However, the built-in humanizing units are essentially random number generators producing only simple uncorrelated fluctuations. Here, for the first time, we establish long-range fluctuations as an inevitable natural companion of both simple and complex human rhythmic performances. Moreover, we demonstrate that listeners strongly prefer long-range correlated fluctuations in musical rhythms. Thus, the favorable fluctuation type for humanizing interbeat intervals coincides with the one generically inherent in human musical performances.
authors: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany. holgerh@nld.ds.mpg.de
authors: Holger
authors: H
authors: Hennig
authors: Ragnar
authors: R
authors: Fleischmann
authors: Anneke
authors: A
authors: Fredebohm
authors: York
authors: Y
authors: Hagmayer
authors: Jan
authors: J
authors: Nagler
authors: Annette
authors: A
authors: Witt
authors: Fabian J
authors: FJ
authors: Theis
authors: Theo
authors: T
authors: Geisel
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D010507:Periodicity