Dr. Holger Hennig

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Although human musical performances represent one of the most valuable achievements of mankind, the best musicians perform imperfectly. Musical rhythms are not entirely accurate and thus
inevitably deviate from the ideal beat pattern. Nevertheless, computer generated perfect beat patterns are frequently devalued by listeners due to a perceived lack of
human touch. Professional audio editing software therefore offers a humanizing feature which artificially generates rhythmic fluctuations. However, the built-in humanizing units are
essentially random number generators producing only simple uncorrelated fluctuations. The nature of temporal fluctuations in complex human musical rhythms has never been scrutinized as
yet. Here, I will show that long-range correlations are an inevitable natural companion of both simple and complex human rhythmic performances. Moreover, it will be demonstrated that
listeners strongly prefer long-range correlated fluctuations in musical rhythms. Thus, the favorable fluctuation type for humanizing interbeat intervals coincides with the one
generically inherent in human musical performances.

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Department of Physics, Harvard University
Seminarraum I. Physikalisches Institut
Contact: not specified