[microsound] "in search of the click track"

Dan Heidebrecht dan at listening-station.net
Tue Mar 3 13:56:37 EST 2009


some fun analysis of beat duration variations

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/

In search of the click track

Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years,  rock drumming has changed.  Many
drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for
live performances)  and synchronize their playing to an electronic
metronome - the click track.   This allows for easier digital editing
of the recording.  Since all of the measures are of equal duration, it
is easy to move measures or phrases around without worry that the
timing may be off.  The click track has a down side - some say that
songs recorded against a click track sound sterile,  that the missing
tempo deviations added life to a song.

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and
which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click
track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python
library that allows you to  analyze and manipulate music).  In my
first attempt, I  used remix to analyze a track and then I just
printed out the duration of each beat in a song and used gnuplot to
plot the data.  The results weren’t so good - the plot was rather
noisy.  It turns out there’s quite a bit of variation from beat to
beat.  In my second attempt I averaged the beat durations over a short
window, and the resulting plot was quite good.

see plots at link above.


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