Do you microrhythm?

What is "MicroRhythm" and how does it affect our perception of groove and music? What is the smallest rhythmic interval we can hear? And is this a learnable skill? I conducted an experiment to find out.

0:00 Intro
1:25 What is MicroRhythm?
2:55 The Experiment
5:17 Results 200-10 ms
9:29 Pro Musicians vs. Rest
12:07 Groove Analysis / Application

[famitory]

everything can be notated, you just have to be ready to break out the 128ths and 96-tuplets

[kirjian]

Don't wanna jinx it, but I'm so thankful that traditional copyright laws don't include drum melodies or grooves, so we can analyze drum legends to our heart's content :)

[jollkki]

Fun fact: dogs apparently have almost perfect sense on rhythm. Saw it on QI episode. They trained a dog like 118bpm means going for a walk, 120bpm means food. Now if I could only trained my dog to bark when the drummer strats in the wrong tempo! Animal metronome.

[TheChnecht]

Really appreciate your pronunciation of Ernst Heinrich Weber.

[bladejohnson]

im glad this channel has turned into drummer adam neely, love it love it love it

[simongunkel]

I hope you do a follow up on how this affects the "chemistry" between a drummer and a bass player. As a bass player I've played with a lot of drummers and sometimes it is easy to play together and sometimes it is really hard. Over time I've started to feel that this is mostly an issue of having or lacking a shared understanding of microtime. After all, if a beat is slightly behind the quantized position, this could mean two things: tempo modulation or microtime and both of these would imply a different time at which the next beat should occur. The same holds in reverse as well - I might play a note just slightly behind a bass drum hit as a microtime choice and the drummer might try to adjust for me dragging.
Another possible follow up would be something on how to use quantized and unquantized grooves as a means to generate contrast.

[VeritasGames]

The fact that I was like "hmm feels like 10-15 ms early" on that last example makes me far more excited than it probably should.

[jonatha_nbarron]

I get unreasonably excited every time Shawn uploads a video. Man, you do such a great job breaking these concepts done in such a way that it is a joy to learn.

[DereBear]

I’m a composer that started on a non rhythmic instrument, and the fact that I now have an answer to “how do I write a groove” has made my month

[blacklespaul]

This is incredibly valuable for anyone who records themselves practicing, thank you so much!

[noreaction]

I’m proud to call myself an unprofessional musician that can distinguish a difference of 30 msec groove

[ricklang_drummer]

Excellent stuff! I reckon Shawn has already read the famous Finnish study from 2015 analyzing Jeff Porcaro's timing: "Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics in a Virtuoso Drum Track of a Popular Music Recording".

[mickaelzehren]

I believe the micro timing perception is likely going to be relative to the tempo in those tests. By increasing (or decreasing) the tempo, a fixed shift of the 5th note will represent a larger (or smaller) portion of the beat interval. This would be an interesting controlled variable to test.

[Starving_Guitarist]

As a self taught guitarist (15 years) and newbie bass player (4 months) I really expected to do terrible, but my scores were consistently 8 and 9 until 10ms. 10 and 5 were rough... this is all as fascinating as people's pitch perceptions. I love studies about this stuff, great video!

[JesseGuo]

I can feel my drummer brain expanding from this video

[LimeHunter]

7:22 The KidPix "oh no!"
Very neat study, I wonder what would happen if you performed this survey on rhythm game players as well?

[_Olorin]

Dude, props to your data interpretation. Most people who don't have a background in experimental sciences don't know how to properly interpret and - more importantly - criticise their data.

[project_jdm]

I love everything about this video 🤙🏻 Everything is well explained and I like how you even went into the ms necessary to identify a difference. Microrhythms are the key to studying the center of mass of rhythms and seeing what feelings are produced when those small shifts in timing happen. There's all sorts of fun stuff there. Great work!

[MaartenBlij]

The unquantized beat at 14:00 made me bob my head while the quantized version did not. It's very subtle, but you do feel it.

[hanthonyc]

Drumming ABSOLUTELY changed how I "felt" music as I played it. I'm totally unsurprised we're well represented in this niche music skillset.... and was surprised by how confidently I could see myself taking this test... until you brought up drummers 🤣