Changing the pace is not so easy, reveals a music application

London, Oct 20 (IANS) Scientists at Queen Mary University in London have developed an application to understand why some rhythms are more difficult to perform than others.

The team collected and analyzed a vast dataset of more than 100,000 people and discovered that it is more difficult to change pace than to play on a complex individual rhythm.

"In music psychology, it is quite rare to study the performance of changing rhythms, especially when they are played in groups with another player, yet they are very common in current music." said Dr. Sam Duffy of the Queen Mary's School of Electronic Engineering Science.

The application encourages users to play Clapping Music, an innovative musical piece written by contemporary classical composer Steve Reich, fully performed by applause.

In the original piece, two people applaud the same short rhythmic pattern, while one moves the pattern gradually until the patterns are aligned again.

In the application, developed with the London Sinfonietta and Touchpress, the camera takes the role of the performer playing the static pattern and the user the role of the artist performing the transitions of the motif.

Rather than applaud, players type in a performance zone in the lower part of the screen.

Users from more than 100 countries have downloaded the application more than 250,000 times since its launch in July 2015.

The research focused on the first 12 months, including 109,303 players and a total of 46 million rows of game data.

The results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, provide a better understanding of the musical factors that determine difficulty or difficulty in playing a rhythm.

The results showed that the accuracy of the performances varied not with the complexity of the individual rhythms of the piece, but with the complexity of the transition between the rhythms, which was not studied in traditional musical psychology. laboratory based.

"Despite the apparent simplicity of Clapping Music, it's a difficult piece to play and the application generates a very large and complex data set to analyze," said Dr. Duffy.

The researchers hope that the results could lead to similar, large-scale, game-based approaches to exploring other aspects of music psychology than the rhythm or even the psychology of other artistic fields such as the music and dance.

–IANS

na / vm