Why does swing sound so "good" ?

[BosseJo]

The thing is that musicians who know how to swing laugh when they see a button on a machine that says "Swing Function". They laugh even harder when they see that the button can also control how much swing the user wants to use.

I'm glad they're and not

[nuffink]

Every now and then somebody asks a question along the lines of "Why is there so little rhythm theory?".
I reckon we have an answer.
Something as apparently simple in concept as swing can't be defined, not even by college professors (strange how they've all had a formal musical education; still, I digress).
If you haven't learned it over decades at the feet of Bleeding Gums Murphy or Blind Banana Lincoln, don't even try to understand it. Unlike say counterpoint, swing is too subtle and too complex.
The bonus is that after paying your dues you get to laugh at the swing function on sequencers.

[Sascha Franck]

Btw, IMO swing can perfectly be analyzed. And in case it's not done by college professors, it might simply be because they're rather clueless (which I can sort of prove...).

I can put almost any file into my sequencer of choice, then rebuild it via MIDI, then fool around with whatever quantize-, delay- and dynamic settings.
Just because most professors aren't aware of these "new" (erm...) technical possibilities doesn't make them right with supporting whatever "swing myths" might be there.

I do *of course* totally agree that swing isn't just about delaying the offbeat 8th so it falls onto the 3rd 8th note triplet - there's a whole lot more to it (see my previous post). But, even the additional things, such as timing, accents and whatnot can be analyzed, and in case things are happening not just randomly (which they aren't, there's repeating "patterns" in whatever sort of swing music all over the place), they can be adapted/learned and therefor teached as well.

Making the swing issue some sort of myth is absolutely clueless. It's just a rather complexed issue, but so are a lot of other things in life. Hence it's taking a lot of time to master it, both by means of technical issues and taste.

[nuffink]

Making the swing issue some sort of myth is absolutely clueless.

It's worse than clueless. It's the kind of bullshit newbs get from bitter old muso's unwilling or incapable of passing on whatever small amount of knowledge they've gleaned over the years. It's a plague in the world of music. Probably because so many musicians have such a shaky grounding that it's easier to mythologise the process than explain it.
I thought the idea of this forum was to go some small way in countering that nonsense?

[Sascha Franck]

Amen, nuffink!

[aciddose]

i only read the first 2 pages and this 4th, was bored by the third.

i do not think anybody tried to answer the question though.

the reason i think swing sounds "good" is because by offsetting a beat, you cause a higher activity level in the brain's pattern detection mechanisms. in my opinion, the reason this is pleasureful is that the brain rewards itself in order to build the pattern recognition and associated memories systems upon successful prediction of a pattern. the more complex the pattern which is predicted, the larger the reward !1. there is a fine line between which patterns are very complex and reliable to predict vs. patterns which no longer trigger the detection systems.

the half beat swing is probably the most simple swing which can be applied, at the same time being the most reliable for activation of those systems.

that i think is why the half beat swing feels "so good".

the patterns you get by applying an offset to high hats in a more complex pattern (ala tr-909 flam) are much better though, and in my opinion more rewarding vs. the difficulty of it's implementation.

!1) i'm only partially correct here. the reward system must be considerably more complex than i'm capable of imagining. i think it must have some mechanism designed to balance the cost vs. benefit of pattern detection ability vs. memory/bandwidth/systems usage. it probably takes into account the "usefulness" of predicting the pattern as well as the frequency with which such a pattern will be "required" (need to predict accurately in order to secure overall benefit) to be predicted. i could go on with my thoughts on this but i'm sure there are some research documents available.

[jens]

Making the swing issue some sort of myth is absolutely clueless.

It's worse than clueless. It's the kind of bullshit newbs get from bitter old muso's unwilling or incapable of passing on whatever small amount of knowledge they've gleaned over the years. It's a plague in the world of music. Probably because so many musicians have such a shaky grounding that it's easier to mythologise the process than explain it.
I thought the idea of this forum was to go some small way in countering that nonsense?

I partially agree, but not completely.

When I did my civil-service (it's what you do over as a pacifist insetad of going to the army) I worked in a school for physically handicapped children. Physical handicaps often also lead to mental ones so what was taught during the classes was often rather restricted but still they aimed at explaining the whole world - hence they simplified.

Pointilism for instance became 'paintings made of dots' - and this really annoyed me. The idea of pointilism, as you might know, is to get achieve gradual color changes which are impossible to get by mixing the colors directly - the technqiue works similarly to a tv which actually only has three colors. Pointilism is a complex technique leading to a complex result. If you take away this complexity then nothing worth mentioning is left.

So if those teachers really weren't able to really teach the idea behind pointilism because it was too complex for these pupils I think they better shouldn't have attempted to teach it at all because what they did was misleading, misinforming and stupid. They surely had good intentions but nonetheless they imo totally failed.

Or to quote Einstein: 'things should be as simple as possible - but not simpler'

But then again: perhaps at least some of the pupils would have been able to get it after all if the teachers would have attempted to really explain it.

But then you still have to leave that MPC bollocks away.

[nuffink]

i do not think anybody tried to answer the question though.

Ok, in the interest of rerailment...

I don't think you can divorce swing from dance. The syncopation implicit in swing makes a dancer throw their hips sideways to hit the offbeat. This feels good at a primal level. Even if you don't dance.

[xtp]

Swing is cool because it moves.

[aciddose]

i really doubt it has anything to do with the physical systems of the body. there will be physical interfaces connected to the pattern recognition systems of course, and physical patterns will have the same effects. being able to tie the whole systems together (auditory stimulating pattern recognition, through conscious process used as a drive signal for physical systems, in turn also stimulating pattern recognition) of course should have an even greater effect. it seems there would be several feedback loops set up when dancing which would achieve significant amplification and drive even more systems into active states.

[nuffink]

C++ programmers don't dance.

[rounser]

Give up nuffink; the accepted wisdom is that swing is magic, and so belongeth in the mystical fairie realm alongside hardware is always better, synthesizers aren't real instruments, wooden volume knobs make music sound better, and vsts can't make bass.

Resistance is futile, you may as well take the red pill because the Stupid already has you.

[Chris Walton]

At least, 'swing' or the more modern term 'shuffle' (borrowed from boogie) got its popular attention in modern dance music (e.g. techno/house) with the introduction of the 'Schaffelfieber' V.A. compilations appearing on the Kompakt label. Here artists stick to a dogma-like rule of off-beating hihats and hereby producing that well, uhm, nicely shuffled beat.

Schaffel

*Edit*: I admit: although I never completely understood various variants in making a beat 'swing' (technically wise) I swung a lot to those beats. B.t.w. I thought swing is not working very well on music with high speed ( > 170 BPM), like tarnce, but I'm obviously wrong, since drum and bass proves the opposite.

Tarnce is typically 130-140bpm

And I found that DnB is going more for the quantized sound than the swung sound .. but I may be wrong.

I think the argument that swing is "Human Time" is completely valid because when I enter drum stuff on my midi controller, I almost always find that I added some swing time when I look at what I played in the piano roll.

[aciddose]

i'm not sure about that. i do not dance though, that is true

more importantly c++ programmers (should!) understand modular/object oriented systems like the human brain seems to be.

we know as fact that the brain is modular, since the systems not only operate in a logically modular way, based upon experimentation they're also physically localized in ways which seem to match up with what you would expect a 3d map of the modular layout to look like.

if you're going to talk about swing beats using dancing as a basis, you're doing something more like old procedural programming (c or older) where you'd first figure out what you want to do and then put the whole thing into a function. dance(swing);

if you're talking about things from an object oriented point of view, "dance" is actually some interface code which is built using many modules. it probably uses [physical] for it's core, while managing input/output with several other systems, in this case probably eventually connecting to [conscious] and [pattern recognition].



while they're both fundamentally procedural, just like c vs. c++, there is a difference. the difference is that in the object oriented version dance() is not a procedure or an object. it is not something which exists on it's own. it is the behavioral outcome of a collection of objects being assembled into an interface by a procedural driving program.

an even more interesting idea that has just come to my mind is that due to this difference. think of when i mentioned that dance() is in fact only the outcome of a particular combination of modules with particular inputs and outputs. if the modules were to be over time connected randomly, you would eventually achieve an outcome of dance(). this brings me to question, is this what we are? is dance() simply the outcome of some of our modules being connected in a particular way, or is there actually a procedural intent assembling dance() for some specific purpose?

so, to look at things from the first point of view, where dance() is a procedure all on it's own, with a purpose and intent, you're really looking at everything in a certain way then.

is god a procedural or object-oriented programmer?

[herodotus]

Making the swing issue some sort of myth is absolutely clueless.

It's worse than clueless. It's the kind of bullshit newbs get from bitter old muso's unwilling or incapable of passing on whatever small amount of knowledge they've gleaned over the years. It's a plague in the world of music. Probably because so many musicians have such a shaky grounding that it's easier to mythologise the process than explain it.
I thought the idea of this forum was to go some small way in countering that nonsense?

OK

I don't know if I am one of the people who have been accused of mythologizing swing, but lets assume that I am, just for the fun of it.

It was in fact right here at kvr that I finally came to the conclusion that swing is an ill-understood concept. Because I saw one seemingly intelligent member assert with his usual vigor and invective that swing has nothing to do with triplets, when to me triplets (or rather, tertiary divisions of time) were in fact the key to making sense of swing.

For example: this is a fragment of the song 'String of Pearls' sequenced with eighth notes, as it is written in standard 'fake' books: http://www.realmusicmedia.net/stringofp ... eighth.mid

here is the same fragment sequenced using triplets: http://www.realmusicmedia.net/stringofp ... iplets.mid

To me the second example sounds much much closer to the feel of the original. So much so that I feel vaguely irritated when seeing it written in eighth notes over and over again.

I have never understood this practice, which is ubiquitous in the world of jazz. This is supposedly because swing is

where instead of 2 notes being performed equally, the first is made longer than the second.

(So the second note is delayed slightly)
Swing may either be notated with different note values, indicated by other instructions in the score, or even implied without any written indication.

The exact amount of swing can vary, from something like a ratio of 1.5:1 to 3:1. It is important to note that swing is generally meant to be felt. - It is not supposed to be mathematical, and it is often open to interpretation.

Now THIS seems like obscurantism to me: taking something as simple as broken triplets and making it out to be this mysterious process that can be notated in any number of contradictory ways. Yet this is the standard wisdom on the subject.

And the strange part is that I have played with jazz musicians for years; happily, without incident or audible misunderstanding. They with their fake books and eighth notes and variable ratios, I with my triplets and an early teachers exhortation to relax while playing energetically. And it works. All have been content with the resulting music.

Conclusion: swing is a nebulous and ill-understood concept.