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| quote: | Originally posted by Bierheld
You know, there's is like an interesting discussion in here if you're just talking about general tempo progression in club nights.
I just think it's stupid to focus on BPM's because you (or I at least) can't accurately tell The BPM of the songs played just by listening to them. You can really only tell the difference in song tempo's relative to each other. I.O.W., It's either faster or slower then the last one. So claiming you want a range of 125-135 seems rather daft to me. The difference is barely noticable without context. It's also unnecessarily restrictive, you can't really boil live music down to technicalities like that, like someone mentioned in this very thread: If the DJ drops an awesome that's say 10 BPM out of your supposed "comfort range", you're not going to walk away are you? |
I can roughly hear BPMs. If it's a 4/4 beat I can usually guess within a 5bpm range. I'm especially accurate between 120 and 145, perhaps because I mostly DJ in that tempo frame. Breaks throw me more, because they tend to sound slower than they really are, and anything below 100bpm just gets identified as "slow" by my ear.
But it's especially noticeable when you're dancing, because you're not just hearing a speed, you're moving in time with that speed. It affects what you do when you dance and how comfortable you are doing certain things. I have a totally different way of dancing to hip-hop than to, say psy-trance. If a DJ suddenly changes tempo by 10bpm and the track is awesome I'm not going to leave the floor, but I'll feel the difference and move in a different way. And again, I said 125-135bpm is my favourite range, not the only range I'll tolerate. I find it easiest to dance to, the most fun to dance to and the right energy level for extended periods of dancing.
You might find the following study interesting, which took the average tempo of thousands of dance records across a ten year period between 1998-2008 and analysed the results. I'll copy-paste the conclusion, which pretty much backs up what I'm saying, but adds a bit more science to it.
https://biblio.ugent.be/input/downl...9797&recordOId=
| quote: | The long-term study and comparison to a diversity of data,
obtained from different sources with a different stylistic
background, allows us to distinguish between fixed factors and
fluctuations related to the emergence of musical styles
connected with specific body movements. The analysis of the
‘Scandinavian dance charts’ over a period of 10 years shows
that the main peak remains very consistently located at 128
bpm, this is supported by the data from other bpm-lists, which
also illustrate a main peak at 128 bpm. The result of an analysis
in which we simply retain the minimum value for each bpm
over the 10 years studied is shown in figure 8.
Again we see the range from 125 to 130 bpm stand out, with
an extension towards 136 bpm. The slower tempi almost
completely disappear from the raw data analysis, while some
inconsistent noise remains apparent in the smoothed data
analysis. This indicates that tempi across the peak range are not
permanently played, but belong to certain trends that gain
popularity over a limited time-span and are afterwards replaced
by new hypes. Looking for variation in the data throughout
time has allowed to identify the styles behind different tempo
zones and to trace their evolution throughout time (e.g. the
decline of 'trance' and fast techno 1998-2004 or the importance
of R&B in the period 2002-2005).
The constancy of the 125-130 bpm range suggests that this
corresponds to a natural frequency that stimulates people to
dance. This fundamental relation to movement and perception
fixes the position of the main peak, while the secondary peaks
that appear, depend more on trends and the popularity of
certain substyles. Dance music not situated within the preferred
range can be associated with different types of movement. And
can be related to other resonance phenomena. Thus the slower
tempi around 95 bpm can be related to more circular
movements, such as hip swings, which are often associated
with afro-american music and have some sexual connotations.
In this case the typical up-and-down, locomotion related
resonance is replaced by a fundamentally different type of
behavior with a slower natural frequency. When dealing with
higher frequencies, an opposite effect could be expected:
people will probably make specific smaller movements.
However, if we look at the music styles discussed here, notably
trance, we might keep in mind the influence of drug-use,
especially party-drugs like XTC or amphetamines. It is still
possible to move freely to tempi around 140 bpm, but,
according to the resonance model, it will take more energy to
attain a similar level of movement. Thus the use of stimulating
drugs, and behavior imitating this, will make it possible to deal
with this higher frequency dancing. If we increase the tempo
scale we see that the basic movements become smaller and are
combined with larger movement coinciding with lower metric
levels. This is the case both in boogie-woogie dancing, where
small foot-steps at the fast speed are combined with large
swinging movement, as well as in hardcore techno dancing
where short kicks (‘hakkuh’) are combined with slower arm
movements.
The natural tempo for dancing within a social context can be
fixed around 128 bpm. This is only slightly above the assumed
natural resonance at 2 Hz (120 bpm), associated with natural
movement in music and repetitive movements like tapping,
clapping and waving (Moelants, 2002). The same 2 Hz was
found in the long-term energy spectrum of motor activity,
measuring different people during their normal daily activities
(MacDougall & Moore, 2005). Both the 120 bpm ‘spontaneous
movement’-tempo and the 128 bpm ‘dance movement’-tempo
both seem to be quite precisely located. This is shown in the
above analysis for the dance tempo and by MacDougall &
Moore (2005) for the normal human locomotion. They
concluded that the location of the peaks is very fixed among
different test subjects, regardless of the mechanical properties
of their bodies. The 2 Hz phenomenon is also found in
distributions of other samples of music (Van Noorden &
Moelants, 1999; Moelants 2002 Interestingly the ‘pop’-cluster
from our bpm analysis also has a peak closer to 120 bpm.
Apparently, typical dance music occupies a special position if
you compare it to a more general view on tempo distribution in
music. So how can these two frequencies be related? When
looking at the differences in speed when walking to music of
different tempi, Styns, Van Noorden, Moelants and Leman
(2007) found the highest averages in the area 126-138 bpm
with a peak at 130 bpm, thus exactly coinciding with the data
from the dance music analysis. Bertram (2005) found that at a
constrained step frequency of 2.1 steps/s, subjects walked at a
speed exceeding preferable walking speed and not chosing the
most ‘economical’ way of walking. He concluded that in this
area, the ‘cost’ of moving faster than the natural, most
economical, speed, is so low that people easily tend to
accelerate. We can conclude that tempi around 128 bpm are
perfect for a somewhat ‘excited’ movement and that music
provides a good driving force to stimulate rhythmic behavior in
this tempo zone. Thus we see a close relation between the
characteristics of our body and the structural aspects of music
that is designed to make the body move. |
___________________
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> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24
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