Timing in music performance and its relations to music experience
Alf Gabrielsson · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2001
This chapter supplements the previous chapter with some naturalistic data on rhythmic performance. This data confirms that performers make systematic and significant deviations from strict metricality, but also that it is hard to make generalizations about the nature of the deviations. The same figure may be played differently in different contexts, or by the same performer on different occasions. It treats timing in isolation from other means used by the performer, such as dynamics, intonation, and spectral variations. It also discusses different aspects of timing (tempo, classes of duration, articulation, deviations from mechanical regularity) separately from each other. In reality, however, all these means occur together in a complex, ever-changing interaction, depending on the instrument, the performer, and the situation.