Shaping the Beat Bin in Computer-Based Grooves

Abstract

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 multiple, but slightly asynchronous events marking the beat or digital sound processing obscuring the exact location of beats in pulse-carrying rhythmic layers. The resulting beat shape may produce an internal reference structure of wide ‘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. This chapter discusses 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.