Shaping the beat bin in computer-based grooves

Abstract

In musical genres such as neo-soul and hip-hop, beats often have a temporal shape that makes their location in time difficult to locate relative to a single point in time. Often this comes as a consequence of digital sound processing that obscures the exact location of beats in pulsecarrying rhythmic layers. The resulting beat shape may produce an internal reference structure of “beat bins,” with bin here understood as the temporal width and shape of the internal beat: sound onsets falling within the bin will be heard as merging into one beat, whereas onsets falling outside of it will be heard as belonging to another metrical unit (Danielsen 2010). In the present paper I will discuss the affordances for synchronization that different beat bin widths provide and also how the beat bin shape may affect the feel of a rhythmic groove.