Doom metal songs—in addition to having trudging riffs, distorted timbres, and despairing lyrics—often feature gradual or ambiguous changes in tempo. Our presentation argues that these tempo changes play a central role in listeners’ bodily response, because they achieve many of the same effects of groove described by other authors by manipulating listeners’ temporal expectation and attention, and by combining explicit beat with perceptual complexity.

Our presentation identifies two primary effects of tempo manipulation. Ambiguous tempo changes are created when a gradual tempo change creates metric layers that are both faster and slower than before. Elongated beats occur when a final beat in a cycle is stretched in a way that is metrically ambiguous. We suggest that the rhythmic effects of groove combined with temporal disorientation help reinforce the combination of embodied presence and acceptance of weakness that are central to the style.

In marching arts activities, performers execute musical and choreographic tasks while marching on a football field. The visual component of this activity is not secondary, and closely relates to the musical performance. Sara Bowden (2020) describes how marching musicians embody meter, arguing “the performers’ awareness and consistent replication of embodied meter is not only a very human approach to making music on the move but also an essential pedagogical orientation for marching ensemble.” I expand on these ideas, focusing specifically on rhythmic and technical idiosyncrasies of the drumline, and demonstrate how performers rely on an embodied understanding of their movements and the music in order to achieve an accurate performance.

Rudiments, the rhythmic and sticking patterns that act as building blocks in drumline music, generate rhythmic groupings that can align or conflict with the meter of the music. Like Rachel Gain’s (2022) “embodied choreographic syncopation," these conflicting sticking patterns are felt by the drummers, and this feeling is exaggerated by the fact that these hand movements are also misaligned with the drummer’s feet, which step on the beat. Using Krebs’ (1999) method for analyzing metric dissonances alongside visual demonstration, I illustrate two ways these “sticking syncopations” might arise. First, drummers often perform rhythms or accents that are displaced from the beat. Second, rudiments or sticking patterns can convey a grouping structure that conflicts with the beat, producing a polyrhythmic pattern between the hands and the feet.

I engage directly with drumline practitioners through interviews and fieldwork to more deeply understand the physical movements and feelings of the performer. Instructors often advise drummers to “feel” the timing of their hands in relation to their feet. While there appears to be at times a metric disconnect between the feet and the hands, a drummer’s performance is made possible through their awareness of this embodied syncopation, and use their feet as a stable metric ground from which they interpret rhythmic figures in their hands, a figure-ground cognitive process (Pressing et al. 1996). More broadly, this work centers the practitioner in the analytical process and considers their bodies, movements, and understanding.

Rhythmic complexity research has often used syncopation as a proxy for perceived complexity (PC). While syncopation does contribute to perceived complexity, a recent study [Author 2021] identified other rhythmic characteristics interacting with syncopation to create perceived complexity: tempo, the presence or absence of a metrical pulse, density (the number of onsets in a rhythmic pattern [Eerola et al., 2006]), and durational variability (measured using the nPVI, Patel and Daniele 2003). They found that PC ratings increased as tempo increased, indicating a strong and overlooked effect of tempo. The presence of a metrical pulse decreased PC ratings, suggesting its presence helps moderate other characteristics of rhythmic complexity. In addition, there was a strong tempo-dependent positive correlation between PC and both syncopation and density.

To further explore the relationship of density and syncopation in PC, a large (n=481) study collected PC ratings of rhythmic stimuli varying systematically in density, syncopation, and variability, presented with or without a metrical pulse in six different tempos (64, 75, 90, 113, 150, and 180 bpm). Results confirmed earlier findings, and indicated a complicated relationship between PC and the factors of tempo, context, density, variability, and syncopation. Increases in rhythmic variability led to a decrease in PC at faster tempos, but an increase at slower tempos. The tempo-dependent shift in correlation strength between PC and density and syncopation was clarified; density’s effect on PC decreases at slower tempos, whereas syncopation’s effect remains relatively constant across tempos. The strength of density’s correlation is also dependent on the presence or absence of a metrical pulse; with no pulse present, density is more strongly correlated than syncopation for the four tempos of 180, 150, 113, and 90 bpm, while with a pulse density is more strongly correlated only for the two fastest tempos.

The results of this study demonstrate that while syncopation plays an important role in rhythmic complexity, the two are not equivalent; instead, rhythmic complexity involves a tempo- and context-dependent interaction of multiple factors. This adds to our understanding of perceived complexity and indicates the importance of considering these factors from a perception, production, or analytical perspective.