Musical Micro-Timing for Live Coding

Johnson, Max; Gotham, Mark

Abstract

Micro-timing is an essential part of human music-making, yet it is absent from most computer music systems. Partly to address this gap, we present a novel system for generating music with style-specific micro-timing within the Sonic Pi live coding language. We use a probabilistic approach to control the exact timing according to patterns discovered in new analyses of existing micro-timing data (jembe drumming and Viennese waltz). This implementation also required the introduction of musical metre into Sonic Pi. The new metre and micro-timing systems are inherently flexible, and thus open to a wide range of creative possibilities including (but not limited to): creating new micro-timing profiles for additional styles; expanded definitions of metre; and the free mixing of one micro-timing style with the musical content of another. The code is freely available as a Sonic Pi plug-in and released open source at https://github.com/MaxTheComputerer/sonicpi-metre.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: ISMIR 2023: 4th conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
• Start Date: Nov 5, 2023
• End Date: Nov 9, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Jun 20, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Nov 4, 2023
• Publication Date: Nov 4, 2023
• Deposit Date: Dec 19, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 20, 2023
• Pages: 98-105
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 24th conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10265231
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2048167