Here’s my final project for NYU’s Psychology of Music class, enjoy. Feel free to download this presentation or the full paper.
Abstract
To what degree do people know that they are supposed to clap on the backbeat along with the blues and music like it? Does musical training or practice correlate with knowledge of the backbeat clapping convention? This study tests the hypothesis that clapping on the backbeat of dance-oriented 4/4 rhythms strongly correlates with musical training and experience in music of the African diaspora: jazz, rock, blues, funk, R&B, hip-hop and related styles. Clapping on the backbeat should also correlate weakly with training and experience in other musical idioms.
The backbeat is a form of syncopation. Naively, one might always clap on the strong beats. Accenting the weaker beats creates “rhythmic dissonance” akin to harmonic dissonance in western tonal music. The dominance of the backbeat is a significant factor in the broader Africanization of American popular music, manifested in part by a steadily greater prevalence of syncopation. Despite its ubiquity, the backbeat has faced considerable cultural resistance in America, due in part to racial anxieties.
Participants answered questionnaires to determine their degree of sophisticationboth with African diasporic music and with music generally. They were then recorded clapping to a series of breakbeats representative of contemporary dance music. The recordings were analyzed to determine the number of participants who clapped correctly on the backbeat without prompting.
The majority of participants did indeed clap consistently on the backbeats. I expected participants with the largest ratio of African diasporic to general musical sophistication to have the highest backbeat clapping scores. This was indeed largely the case, though there was more variation than expected. The data show an unambiguous positive correlation between both African diasporic and general musical sophistication scores and backbeat clapping scores. Furthermore, as expected, the correlation is stronger for African diasporic musical sophistication than for general musical sophistication.