The two Flemish musicologists quoted in the previous blog-entry
compacted an impressive amount of BPM data, gathered from radio shows,
BPM lists and recorded music and the result was that the most used BPM
value lays around IOI 450ms (disregarding musical style or genre). This
peak has a steeper decline towards 400ms and a less steeper one towards
600ms, so that both 300ms and 700ms IOI values represent less than 1/3
of the peak magnitude. This only confirms the fact that real-music "beat-specific" IOIs range roughly between 350ms and 650ms.
As a curious fact, the only musical genre in which these averages are
poignantly not complied with is jazz music, where the two musicologists spotted a
huge peak at around 300ms. Now if you go back to blog-entry 007 you
will see why: 300ms (around) was there defined as the fastest "swing-able pace".
Well, jazz players were simply unable not to treat themselves with it. A lot and in big chunks!
Therefore IOI 450ms represents a strong benchmark in the real-music
world. The two Flemish musicologists consider that around this value
our central nevous system is designed to resonate (or: get entrained)
like any other natural damped resonating oscillator (ask a professor of
Physics for definition) and this is precisely why at around this pace
we start tapping feet and bang heads llike lunatics.