The Consultants of Swing

The Consultants of Swing

If jazz musicians can feel it, but not explain it precisely, we should be able to characterize the role of microtiming deviations by having experienced jazz musicians evaluate recordings in which we manipulated the microtiming in various ways. Adopting an operational definition of swing (i.e., the performance of a piece swings if it is judged as swinging by expert listeners) and using an experimental approach, we were able to clarify the controve…