MCG Reading: Dynamic models for musical rhythm perception and coordination
We ended the academic year reading Dynamic models for musical rhythm perception and coordination. The paper is very new (read it within a month of it being published) and provided a really great basis to discuss rhythmic modeling.
To me, it felt kind of like the paper you could structure an entire grad survey course around, discussing both the historical trajectory of this literature and detailing each paper by reproducing all the major figures/equations from the papers referenced.
As someone not as familiar with rhythmic modeling, what felt missing from this review paper was some big chart or table of musical snippets that showed how each model performed given specific musical “problems” (like the “missing beat” rhythms). This might be in the works by these authors, but something like this massive comparison would have really helped someone who gets enough of the ideas behind this work with navigating the whole model complexity - variance explained continuum.
Reading this makes me want to see what rhythms are difficult or easy for these models to navigate. It also makes me wonder why I haven’t done this is some of my recent papers. And if the reason for that is because of the workflow to incorporate musical notation into something like ggplot2.
The discussion really reminded me of thoughts I had earlier this year talking about comparing models.
Of course you can’t do everything in every paper (the original article is ~30 pages with refs) and reacting to the paper by coming up with a giant project to do is in reality a high scientific compliment. Scientific papers should enable further work via synthesis and critical discussion and this paper does that.
The reading group will be off for the next two months, but will return again in September 2023.