Electronic music is mostly produced with tools that are kept in the black box of the studio. Bass music is percussion-driven and its aesthetic is in between club and experimental music. It thus makes a great repertoire to explore rhythm, groove and musical time at different scales, bringing together popular music studies, music technology, and music cognition.
How do bass music producers approach groove design? In addition to "danceability", what other qualities do they seek to bring up? How do they design grooves and musical time so that these qualities arise? What are the attributes of groove, their timing range, their best descriptors? Are these descriptors only a matter of time, or should other parameters be included? The underlying hypothesis of this project is that Bass music seeks to directly engage with listener’s attention and expectations, and not merely make people move.
These questions are addressed by analysing a corpus of professionnally produced Ableton Live sets (DAW source files) and by conducting fieldwork in Norway and Germany. Rather than exclusively pursuing an onset-driven music analysis, special attention is given to the groove qualities of continuous sounds. This perspective enriches the traditional duration-based conception of rhythm with spectral, dynamic and spatial components of musical time.