Meanspeed Music Conjecture
Meanspeed Music research is centered around the math formula (√60 seconds) x 10-1, and features a database of the precise speeds of 15000 selected songs. We expose, describe and illustrate a pattern of order within the seeming chaos of music tempo.
Meanspeed Music, unlike other beats per minute websites and music companies in general, we measure every speed and vouch for every measurement.
In most contemporary Western music the most important elements of a piece are rhythm, speed, groove and timing. Because there are no standard definitions of ‘tempo’ or ‘beat’, where such elements are the first about which a new listener will ask - for example, “What’s that new song like? Is it upbeat?” - it is an element of music that demands the most powerful and focused study.
Most articles regarding emotive elements are avoided. The difference between our method and the classical academic method, which has failed, is simple. In this area where no accepted paradigm exists, we chose to collect the precise speeds in a database where n = 15,000. In classical academic experiments, the approximate number of subjects is 25. It has been a tougher road for us because we dare to use the inductive method of logic - as noted, there are no accepted universal standards of correlation between the speed of music and that which is emoted.
Academics are outstanding at describing the way in which they can find no correlation between tempo ranges and emotional expression for understandable reason: when you have 15 subjects playing 8 bars of a Beethoven piece 8 times, you are not going to find very much. The most insulting element of this system to any clinician studying this topic or to the parents or students paying exorbitant tuition rates to ‘professors’, is the $30 to $40 demanded for most 10-15 page ’studies’ none such study yielding anything that would change the songs on your iPod. This is hardly a surprise where neurologists, biologists, musicologists and audiologists all write about the same element in a different language. Worse yet they don’t speak to each other. For example, a timing sequence to a musicologist which would be called ‘75 beats per minute’ to a neurologist it’s called a ‘mean saccade lasting 800 milliseconds’. It continues - the identical timing sequence to most audiologists would be called ‘1.250 Hertz’.
Writing found anywhere from the Yale Music Labs to pieces found on Google Scholar regarding tempo and psychology are eloquent elaborate excuses as to why Professor A’s experiment yielded no helpful findings. In addition, the academics are excellent at telling us that since they are unable to find relationships between tempo and psychology that “this is an area ripe for more studies”. Not surprisingly such further studies most often parallel the expertise of Professor A. As a result, the most esteemed theorists can at least agree on one thing: there is no standard definition of a beat, there is no standard definition of tempo and there is no standard definition of timing.
When presented with Meanspeed Music, most scholars are experts at pretending not to understand clear and natural concepts. This is not a surprise, as their “profession” demands that they not understand the theory. Finding out that 25 years of deductive experiments are not even obsolete but irrelevant, and that an “outsider” found what you were looking for without seeking to explore any music theory is common in academia - and yet devastating. Although Dr. Manfred Clynes praised my work as “a goldmine of data,” Professor Russell Van Gelder, M.D., Ph.D., of Washington and Stanford University suggested that because the emotions and expressions about which I write not only lack definitions in academia, many scientists do not believe that emotions exist as independent entities at all. Without either definitions of tempo or emotion which are are universal or axiomatic, they may not be used as independent variables. Based on the assistance of these two kind professors, I call this project a Conjecture and not a “theory”.
Our database was originally made and used for rhythm exercises at the piano. In fact, after approximately 300 songs were cataloged the tempo ranges which are offered as a universal tempo scale have not changed. Each calibrated piece of music is put to the test in as demanding a way as possible in the realization that the ideas presented, if incorrect, represent a bombastic waste of time. Every time measurement is analyzed with a critical eye as to disprove this conjecture. After 19 years of research and 12 years of consistently publishing these ideas online, exceptions and ironies remain standing as fascinating exceptions to the natural speed phenomena, the conjecture has held and is growing. We have never been more enthusiastic about having uncovered a pattern and nature that has always been.
Vital: Meanspeed Music Research examines and exposes the expressions of musicians not reactions of the listener. This is precisely the element that separates Meanspeed Music from other websites. We know that we cannot use “mind control” through music to make you feel any particular emotion. As discovered by the German scientists in the 19th century in studies that sstand the test of time, every person has unique preferences. Any website that tells you that they are going to control your mind through music is lying to you - unless they’ve personally worked with you.
For example, few want to hear a song of enthusiasm when they are seriously feeing the blues. As written in Daniel Powter’s song “Bad Day”, one takes a sad song to turn [a bad day] around. Or as Sting said, “There’s nothing worse than a happy song; happy songs depress me”. This simple concept is found in writings dating to the Old Testament. “Singing to a person who is depressed is like taking off a person’s clothes on a cold day or like rubbing salt in wound” (Proverbs, 25:20). This we assert: the tempo of a piece of music is more predictive of the emotional expression of that which is being played than any lyrics attached thereto. Lyrics are important, melody is beautiful but speed patterns are unavoidable. We are not so naive as to say that tempo is the most important element of music psychology but we offer complete access to our information free of charge because, in our opinion, it is the most important overlooked and undiscovered element of contemporary music ideas.
Contrary to popular intuition, over 90% of songs remain within a 4% tempo range. Specifically, tempo as the underlying pulse to the immeasurable sub and poly-rhythms that lie on top may strike the illusion of accelerating and deccelerating through a musical trick. That musical trick? Dynamics. The louder one plays the same piece the faster it sounds.n This speed, however, is an aural illusion. One second of music contains at least 144,000 bytes of music from which to choose we will part of time receive or perceive the “beat”. Humans, like birds hearing bird songs or dolphins communicating, have an uncanny knack for picking out tempo even where the beat is not landing on the noise receiving the loudest dynamic. In fact, there is no computer program that can reliably determine what tempo is exactly for this reason. We may hear the beat on a space in a song where there is a silence, as an example. A computer would not have this perception and so could not pick out this quality.
The patterns were first noticed in the course of some intensive rhythm-exercises at the piano. I found myself wanting to understand the basis of a phenomenon that had always interested me. That was how even subtle changes in tempo can alter the mood of a given piece. I began to take notice of the tempo of popular songs, randomly at first. Then later I became more methodical, using stop watches and multiple timings to arrive at accurate measurements of beats-per-minute.
The results suggested the presence of an underlying logic. I understood that a large sample would be necessary before I could come to any real conclusions. So I began to compile an extensive database of popular songs, which I then sorted by tempo. This project took more than 4 years. When the database stood at about 200 song-titles I saw the patterns that are the basis of the meanspeed conjecture.
What I saw were clusters of songs with similar moods. Emotions identified in the songs’ titles and lyrics corresponded to certain bpm (beats per minute). The divisions were clear and critical. I found that adding or subtracting even a few beats per minute, and the song entered a whole new category. These categories were not always predictable. Mathematically contiguous tempos were sometimes aligned with unlike emotions. The evidence suggested a complex scale or spectrum, something quite different from the crude intuition many listeners have that “fast equals happy, slow equals sad.”
These findings are unprecedented. Until the meanspeed conjecture, no one had ever assigned specific tempi in 4/4 songs to emotion and expression. It had always been thought that “a number in itself has no meaning” (Brahms). A deep structure has been exposed, with limitless applications in aesthetics and entertainment.
Seeking independent confirmation of the measurements themselves, I mailed hundreds of pages of hardcopy - lists, formulas, charts, notes - to the best in academia. Using the pre-internet technologies of 15 years ago, I had contacts with and response from Bruno Repp of Yale, Dr. Manfred Clynes of Sentics, Dr. Russell Van Gelder of Washington and Stanford University, and the musician, physicist and professor, Dr. Dan Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music who agreed that my numbers are accurate to within .017% of the master digital source. From that, MeanSpeed LLC was born and incorporated in New York August 31, 2001.
The database has grown to approximately 15,000 titles. With that, I find further confirmation of my basic hypothesis. Some anomalies do occur (songs whose lyrics seem at variance with the tempo-mood), but closer analysis shows either an intentional “irony” (tension) or a composition-history of “switching” (new lyrics grafted onto an old musical vehicle).
It is our hope that as we go forward with our studies it will enhance the enjoyment of music and a musician’s ability to express himself, as the “emotional palette” is more commonly understood and used. To the extent that the findings herein are accepted as truth, application of the concepts has no limit.
Sincerely,
Ian Schneider
New York, New York
March 2008
Meanspeed Music Theory (”meanspeed conjecture”) helps define the tempo ranges between 54 and 128 beats per minute. These contain twelve ranges of emotions expressed within these tempos.
The MeanSpeed Scale, developed in 1992, where all numbers represent speed as beats per minute, and emotions are expressions, not necessarily emotional reactions:
Those ranges are as follows:
- 54-58-Melodrama
- 59-62-Sincerity
- 63-69-Ceremony
- 70-76-Grace
- 77-78-Bittersweetness
- 79-84-Loneliness
- 85-89-Renewal
- 90-97-Enthusiasm
- 98-105-Comfort
- 106-113-Lust
- 114-118-Foreboding
- 119-128-Victory
In the earliest days of popular music recording, the composers who wrote were not the musicians who recorded. Neither Irving Berlin nor Cole Porter performed or recorded any of their own songs. Neither Judy Garland nor Frank Sinatra ever wrote a song. By contrast, of the 15,000 pieces calibrated, many are of this type - the one who wrote the song and performed it themselves. Therefore I included the bulk of the catalogs of the works of: The Police, U2, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles and Sir Paul McCartney. When music is measured with the meanspeed methodology, analysis of these singers/songwriters such as the aforementioned, not much emotion is lost in translation. Especially with the quality of the new DVD’s and concert footage in particular, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and the Dave Matthews Band’s “Weekend on The Rocks”, tempo analysis is easily available to anyone who is interested in the speed of music. Comparative calibrations of performances of the same song in many settings, on legal recordings, has focused the meanspeed conjecture as never before. Thank you Dolby 5.1.
As in publication, photography and news media, digital technology that produces work once only available to a professional musician and sound engineers are affordable, if not free. Techniques which were once so costly that only the most well known bands could take advantage of their performance are now available to virtually anyone with a laptop for a price of a cup of coffee. In regard to technology, only since 1984 has digital music been available to the public in general. Why is this important? Because the ‘wow and flutter’ factor is: gone. The difference between the speed of the mastered recording, before the advent of digital music was prone to the fluctuations in speed of the listener’s equipment.
The advance in technology allows a huge leap in time measurement. Instead of calibrating tempi with an expected error of 3-5% from the original source, contemporary and affordable digital playback devices such as the CD player - the source of over 90% of the music I analyzed have no wow nor flutter whatsoever. Just as importantly, quartz stop watches which are necessary for the degree of precision I needed to attempt my method of proof have only been available to the public in general at a reasonable cost are new.
A large part of our publishing our material online without cost is an invitation to you to apply the meanspeed conjecture. For example, musicians who practice with a metronome will play better. Many argue, me amongst such, that many musicians will see their playing improve manifold times simply by being able to work with the beat. For people diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, Hyperactivity Disorder and most importantly, Alzheimer’s Disease/Dementia, applications for the meanspeed conjecture are virtually limitless. For those manipulated by marketing jingles or simply thinking of such manipulation, meanspeed conjecture finds a way to free the mind from tape loops which turn into earworms which can run in your head to the point of hospitalization.
You may have walked through a Wal-Mart, K-Mart or Target store trying to out-think Muzak that you thought was trying to manipulate you into buying, when in fact, the manipulation is going on in your mind. The “mind control” of the Muzak is nothing more than sweet ear candy that is piped through the store simply to keep the atmosphere attractive enough for a customer to stay as long as possible. The longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy something. That old Van Morrison song that manipulated you into buying a new suit? News: You just wanted a new suit.
“The Closing of The American Mind” equated sex with rock and popular music to such an extent that the late Professor Allan Bloom was ignorant, naive and grandiose regarding his linkage of music to sex. Masters & Johnson and Alfred Kinsey brought the rhythms of sexuality into public dialogue. There are rhythms involved with the sex act, including results obtained through EEGs, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, fMRIs. The only instance where a man and woman have the same tempo for any time at all is at the point of orgasm - specifically, the genitals and sphincter of both men and women strongly contract in rhythm 6-10 times, slowing down until they stop. The speed? 100 pulses per minute, at the peak, slowing down unto the stop. Where was this sexual conjecture made axiomatic? Germany.
There are a myriad of devices, ideas and people profiteering from the public’s innocent naivety regarding music tempo and its effect on the mind. Many so-called theories such as the “Mozart Effect”, a term coined by Alfred A. Tomatis in 1992, when he used Mozart’s music as the listening stimulus in his work attempting to cure a variety of disorders. In 1997, Don Campbell wrote the book “The Mozart Effect: Tapping The Power to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit” and became very rich off of Mr. Tomatis’ concept. We have all seen such products as “The Mozart Effect for Children” and “The Mozart Effect for Adolescents” and “The Mozart Effect for Slackers”. Is the Mozart Effect real? Absolutely not. A report published by the German Research Ministry in 2007 analyzing presumably all the scientific literature on music and intelligence concluded that “…passively listening to Mozart - or indeed any other music you enjoy - does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child’s IQ in the long-term”.
How does that of a Don Campbell continue to make money? Simple. Ideas will linger in perpetuity until proof of the purported effects of phenomena, such as the nonexistent Mozart Effect, eliminates the lie.
If you think we have fallen into the trap of finding patterns where wishful thinking (I’ve read “The Black Swan” three times, predictably irrational once, and beginning a 3rd reading of “Fooled By Randomness”) and arbitrary choices of music brought us to this set of conclusions, the highest good you can do is write us about our mistakes. The conjecture is an invitation not yet established as a valid set of ideas. Our methodology is available from the drop down menu and is simple to apply. This leaves you to move the ideas along as we continue to work with diligence.
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