Would somebody mind explaining how a song that sounds really fast can have a low beats-per-minute and vice versa?
I was browsing around online databases looking for songs in the 120-140 BPM range for a workout playlist. As might be expected, it seemed that faster/livelier songs generally had higher BPMs, but some slow-sounding songs had really high BPMs, and some fast-sounding songs had relatively low BPMs. I’m confused. How on earth could Ain’t No Sunshine have a higher BPM than Hey Ya? Clearly I don’t get how this beats per minutes thing works.
Here are 4 fast and 4 slow songs in the 159-161 BPM range as examples:
OutKast - Hey Ya! - 159 BPM
The Romantics - What I Like About You - 161 BPM
The Monkees - I’m a Believer - 160 BPM
Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away - 160 BPM
Bill Withers - Ain’t No Sunshine - 160 BPM
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust - 161 BPM
John Lennon - Woman - 160 BPM
Meat Loaf - Two out of Three Ain’t Bad - 160 BPM
On the opposite side, Dr. Feelgood by Motley Crue (111), sounds faster to me than Girls Girls Girls (140). And Motorhead’s speed-metal classic Ace of Spades (140) sounds faster to me than Crue’s Kickstart my Heart (179).
I do not know where you are getting the BPM figures, but taking Ain’t No Sunshine as a good example. A musician would normally put this song in 4/4 time, where a four-best measure would have the phrase “<rest> Ain’t no sunshine when she’s” and the next measure would be “gone”. That gives a BPM of approximately 60-70. I think the BPM you see for that is probably twice as fast as how a musician would write this song. Normally a “beat” is a quarter note, but it looks like they assigned a “beat” to an eighth note, which has half the duration of a quarter note. I see pretty much the same issue with “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”. For “I’m A Believer” they seem to have it right.
I do not know how they determine BPM but I suspect it is automated somehow and the algorithm doesn’t always understand what the true beats are.
The harmonic “pace.” Does the song tend to change chords once per measure? Twice per measure? Once every two measures? As Alan Pollack notes in his essays on Beatles songs, good songwriting often involves speeding up or slowing down the harmonic pace for particular effects within the song.
The rhythm section (percussion, often bass as well) – is the drummer rat-tat-tatting away in sixteenth notes, or just relying on a twice-per-measure floor tom? Is the bassist doing arpeggiated quarter notes, or long sustained notes? Things like that.
Back in the day when I was the world’s worst DJ the software I had would analyse songs and determine their BPM. However, it’s algorithm could only determine BPM if it fell in the 80 to 160 range (this range could be set in software but the top end had to be double the bottom); it wasn’t smart enough to recognize the actual BPM. It would detect strong beats (probably using the bass peaks) but couldn’t tell the difference between 75 and 150 and might actually have only detected 37 peaks per minute. It would then extrapolate to fit whatever range was provided.
The website may have done the same, possibly with later manual corrections whenever errors are found.
The same chunk of music can be written as four quarter notes taking up one full 4/4 measure or as four eighth notes taking up half of a 4/4 measure or as four eighth notes taking up one full 4/8 measure or as four half notes taking up 2 full 4/4 measures or as any of an essentially infinite number of possible ways of expressing it on paper.
Songs’ tempos expressed as “beats per minute” really mean something like “the quarter note gets one beat and those beats come at a rate of 118 per minute” or “the eighth note gets one beat and those beats come at a rate of 125 per minute” or whatever. And as we’ve just seen, that tells you nothing about how fast the actual MUSIC is going to go by.
I’m in a choir that is currently ramping up on the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. There are several places where Beethoven could have chosen to write our parts with whole notes after several measures of really fast-moving quarter notes; instead he changed the TEMPO, jamming on the virtual brake pedal to cut the beats per minute *.
So tempo interacts with the expression of the played notes as quarter, eighth, whole, whatever-notes and also with the “denominator” of the time signature, i.e., whether the quarter note gets one beat or the eighth does or whatever.
By itself, 161 beats per minute is as uninformative as telling someone the piece is written in 4/4 time as far as indicating how fast it’s going to sound.
from prestissimo 132 to adagio 60 in a single measure. Eek!
They both say that the BPM calcs were automated, so the idea that on some songs the software doubled the actual BPM to fit the designated range would make sense.
It seems that most of these databases were created to help DJs figure out smoother segues between songs and/or keep up a consistent pace on the dance floor. I don’t suppose it matters if some songs’ BPMs are doubled on the list - it’s not like some dance club DJ is going to play Ain’t No Sunshine right after Hey Ya just because their numbers are the same. (I’m giggling at the thought of the likely results of doing that, however. )
I’m not sure what most of this terminology means/implies. Examples would be great. Some particular questions:
Does changing chords more often make the song sound faster? WRT to the Beatles songs, does this mean that in some areas of a song they used more chord changes per measure than in other areas?
Are you talking about the difference between a drummer who whacks the drums like a zillion times per second (Keith Moon, Neil Peart) vs. a drummer who doesn’t (Charlie Watts)? Because I’m not sure a given Who or Rush song necessarily sounds faster than a given Stones song I don’t know what an arpeggiated quarter note is, but I assume that means the bassist is playing more “stuff” in a given measure, and that makes it sound faster? Does this apply to lead guitar too?
The matter of a song’s actual BPM is important in terms of finding music that encourages doing a given workout at a given tempo. I know fitness instructors give a lot of attention to it when putting together the music for a class.
I’m looking at the information because I’m making a playlist to listen to when I’m on a cardio machine of some sort. I’ve always found machines to be torturously boring, but I threw some music on my phone and tried it out today. A little Rammstein in the earbuds at 6 AM made it a lot more palatable.
As I said in my OP, most sources recommend a BPM in the 120-140 range for what I’m doing, and naturally I need to use songs that I like and find motivating in that context. I’ll have to experiment to figure out what works for me in particular, but if keeping things within a certain range makes for a better workout, then I’m all for doing it. There’s no shortage of songs out there that I like.
OK, you need to find the beats-per-minute that you like for workout purposes, then you can get songs with that # of beats per minute OR half that many OR twice that many. Avoid that ones that have 1.5 times that many or 0.75 times that many.
The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive is famously selected for folks learning to do CPR. Except of course that if you’re learning from a book and there’s no instructor present to correct you, you could interpret that as meaning one compression every 1.15 seconds (“Well you can TELL by the way I USE my walk I’m a WOMan’s man…”) instead of one compression every 0.57 seconds ("Well YOU can TELL by the WAY i USE my WALK I’m a WOMan’s man…).
In other words, 104 beats per minute is the same pace in a song as 52, as long as the song has the in-between beats discernable to you.
Heh, I do the same thing with songs on my iPod for running. I try to have a cadence of about 170-180 bpm, so I look for songs either at 170-180 bpm or 85-90 bpm. The only difference is when you hit the beat when you step. So, for example, the song “Cherub Rock” is about 85 bpm. So I time my steps to each eight note. With something like “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees (about 180 bpm), I time my steps to each quarter note.
Similarly “Ain’t No Sunshine,” when I looked at the lead sheets, is typically noted as 80 bpm (and that is exactly how I would notate it myself). But you can step to it (or write it out) as 160 bpm, if you’d like.
That’s the idea, yes. Think of “All My Loving.” There’s a chord change per measure in the verses, but a change only every two measures in the refrain. Your mileage may vary, but I perceive the refrains as slower, even though the BPM is unchanged.
Just for the record, I have no intention whatsoever of trying to exercise to Ain’t No Sunshine. I’d end up curled up in a corner crying. It was just an example that jumped out at me.
I’ve been playing around with 2 free iPhone apps to calculate BPM for songs I can’t find in the databases or that I’m not sure about. I tested them against songs with published BPMs.
The first, BPM Detector, is automatic, which is kind of convenient, but it’s too unreliable to be useful. On songs that it was accurate for, it sometimes did calculate the song out at either a quarter or a half of the actual BPM, and for some songs, it did it different ways on different tries. That’s no problem, as it’s easy enough to multiply. On some songs, however, it was all over the map. White Zombie’s More Human than Human is supposed to be around 100 BPM as per the database, and I confirmed that manually. BPM Detector gave me readings between 120 and 140.
The second app was much better. It’s just called BPM. You tap your finger in time with the music, and it gives you an average rate for your taps. I can not keep a beat to save my life, but with the averaging, I ended up getting very good readings. I actually got my reading in less time with the manual tapping method than I did with the automatic app above.
Ahh, gotcha. That makes sense. I’m not sure I pick out a chord change by ear, but some of the main songs that fall into the “I really thought that would be faster” category are those with pretty complicated bass lines, like Primus’s John the Fisherman and Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood. I’m probably perceiving Ain’t No Sunshine as slower than Ziggy Stardust because music for the former is really spare and understated. Am I on the right track here?
Is it at all common for a song to have different tempos in different parts of the song? Not counting intros, outros, and those times where there is a distinctly different part in the middle, of course.
Trying to figure out what tempos and what songs are right for what I’m trying to do is turning out to be a lot of fun.
To illustrate this, the joke, that is, see score excerpts in Wiki Eye music
In Telemann’s Gulliver Suite for two violins the note values in the chaconne are “Lilliputian,” and, in the gigue, are “Brobdingnagian” ones. Because the Lilliputian movement is marked with the equally bizarre time signature of 3/32, and the Brobdingnagian one in 24/1 (which is doubly humorous because gigues are generally light and brisk), the time signatures reduce to 3/4 and 12/8, perfectly normal ones for each movement, as are the tempos associated with them and the type of dance of each.
The unhearable discrepancy between notation is also used by Bach “more seriously” in his Little Organ Book, mentioned in the same Wiki section.
(BTW, except for that very graf on Bach, I wrote and illustrated the entire article.)
Seriously, some songs are, musically, two songs stuck together. We had a thread on this recently. Sometimes, the switch from one “sub-song” to the next involves a tempo change. Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” is a good example.
But a song being musically the same throughout, except for a tempo change? (And not counting retards in the outro, etc., as you said?). Pretty rare. There are some children’s songs and Broadway musical numbers which speed up with every successive verse, so there’s that. Usually for humorous effect.
And, a whole genre of New Orleans dixieland jazz starts a song at a slow, mournful pace, and then the jernt starts jumpin’ about a minute in.
That was the most insightful comment in this thread yet. Too many people, even professional musicians, are unaware of that factor. In my opinion, harmonic pacing has a much greater impact on the perceived speed than BPM.
I also feel that the inability to write tightly-paced harmonies is what condemns composers like Verdi. In his dramatic scenes, the instruments are toiling away in sixteenths, but the music remains unexciting. It only pretends to be fast.
Bruckner’s harmonies also move slowly, but eventually a mediant chord or some chromatic modulation will come along, making it worth the time you spent waiting - unlike Verdi, who’ll just slap down another lazy tonic or dominant.
(And, gee, thanks, Apollon! Sounds like you might enjoy Alan Pollack’s essays. They’re all neatly ordered online, at some Dutch musicology website. Should take you about a year to read them all, and often you’ll find yourself playing a recording of the song in question several times, especially if it’s a song you’re not too familiar with. If you don’t enjoy the Beatles, though, your time would be betters spent elsewhere, duh.)
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