This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers

Author:Susan Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

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In the days before digital handclaps, record makers recorded claps the old-fashioned way: by gathering a group of people around a mic and having them clap together on the beat. When Prince and his crew recorded at home in Minneapolis, we always had musicians around for recording “clap tracks.” But when we worked at Sunset Sound studio in Los Angeles, we sometimes needed to recruit errand runners or folks from the front desk.

When Prince called for “soul claps,” it meant to clap double-time, on every eighth-note: ONE–AND–TWO–AND–THREE–AND–FOUR–AND. He would often call for them onstage during funk songs to get some audience participation. (You can hear him shout, “Are you ready, Paris?! Soul claps!” at the 5:15 mark on “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” from the Sign o’ the Times album.) One day at Sunset Sound it was time to get some soul claps recorded. Prince, a couple of band members, the assistant engineer, and a young female staffer from the front desk put on headphones, gathered around a mic, and started clapping.

Everything started off well enough. As the song progressed, however, the staffer’s claps got further and further off the beat. Puzzled, I stopped the tape, rolled back, and started over. Again, she began well enough, but as the song progressed, her claps grew more and more out of time. Prince signaled me to stop. With an expressionless face, he looked at the woman, raised his arm, and pointed at the door. This was my first encounter with beat deafness.

Just as there are people who can’t carry a tune (tone deafness), there are also people with “two left feet” who can’t follow a beat. Beat-deaf individuals are a valuable resource for neuroscientists. Every mechanic knows that one of the best ways to learn how cars work is to study cars that aren’t working. One way to understand how rhythm perception works is to study people whose rhythm perception isn’t working—folks who cannot dance to the beat, no matter how hard they try.

A coterie of leading music-cognition researchers, led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, conducted a series of experiments on beat deafness in 2011. The researchers posted an ad soliciting volunteers who could not keep time to music. To the scientists’ dismay, most respondents were not truly beat-deaf. Though the respondents honestly believed they had no rhythm, when they were tested in the lab, it turned out that they exhibited at least a modest tactus. Every volunteer could reliably tap along in time with the perceived beat of a song. Fortunately for the researchers, there was one exception: a twenty-three-year-old student named Mathieu.

Mathieu loved music. He had even taken music and dance lessons. However, he confessed that finding the rhythm had always been difficult for him. He had no trouble with pitch or melodies. Mathieu easily passed five of the six tests in the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), a widely adopted measure of tone deafness. Most of these tests present a pair of melodies and ask the listener to say if they are the same or different.

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