The Heartbeat of Music

Where exactly is the beat?

The heartbeat of music is — you guessed it — the beat. Too often, learners like to focus on the notes of a tune and take the beat for granted. But the beats are where the notes live; they give the notes a home, and turn them into music.

So where exactly is the beat to be found? Is it just a metronome click or chirp?

Like the heartbeat in a person, the musical beat is more of a pulse than a click. Our hearts don’t go “boom, boom, boom” like a metronome. They go “ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom,” with a pickup to each beat.

Metronomes and computers will not want to hear this, but musical beats are not merely a mathematical calculation. I’ve run into music software that has a playback setting marked “humanize.” This setting makes the beat slightly random. Apparently, some computer programmers imagine that what makes a beat human is that it’s imperfect.

But that’s just not the way musicians operate. What makes music human is that our timing is responsive, like our heartbeat. Studies about the human heart have shown that there is only one situation in which the heartbeat is perfectly metronomic — just before a heart attack. At that terrible moment, the heart is no longer paying attention or responding to physical signals around it coming in from the blood, breath, muscles and nerves. A healthy heart constantly adjusts to signals in its environment.

Music played by good musicians is responsive to and expressive of the phrasing of the music and the playing of others. Beats are felt in context, with notes leading the listener into each beat like water rising to the crest of a wave. Compare this to the sound of a computer MIDI file, which reads written music precisely and mathematically, and always sounds artificial as a result. Sometimes it is can even be hard to understand music played by a computer, much in the same way that it can be difficult to pick up the words of a non-native speaker who doesn’t quite get the timing and emphasis right. The metronome is a tool that sets a pace, and by checking in with it, we can find out if we are keeping a steady beat. But if we adhere strictly to the clicks of a metronome, we play music like a computer!

How do we mark the beat if it’s not exactly where the metronome tells us it is? If we tap our foot to the music, does the beat the moment our foot hits the floor? Why is it that a roomful of musicians do not necessarily tap their feet in unison?

Maybe the answer can be found by considering how dancers use the beat. When a dancer hops and lands on each beat, where exactly is that beat? Is it when the foot first touches the floor? When the foot reaches its lowest point? When the foot pushes off the floor again? I remember watching a professional dancer and an amateur dance side by side. The amateur bounced on the beat, while the professional milked the beat and appeared slightly late by comparison.

The precise moment for the beat is actually a gray area. Musicians and dancers who are most expressive stretch it, using as much of it as they can. I like to imagine a conveyor belt moving along with a box for each beat. A metronome clicking on each beat is like a person bouncing a ball into the precise center of each box. But good musicians do more than mark the beat; they fill it with sound. Rather than bouncing a ball into the box, musicians fill each box with a big fat water balloon, filling the space rather than merely marking it. As they play, their notes lean toward the beats, creating anticipation before delivering. Their music has intention.

A non-dance tune such as a slow air, or a performance piece, may allow some freedom to stretch and compress beats, but to make sense, this elasticity has to fit the structure of the beats and the arc of the musical phrases. The beat itself may even quicken like an excited heartbeat, or may slow down, but only in context, not in an arbitrary or random way. These small, expressive tempo changes need to feel as natural as your bicycle pedals slowing down as you climb a hill, and speeding up once you reach the top and start downhill again. There has to be a pull, a feeling of gravity.

Expression makes music compelling, whether played for listening or for a function like dancing. Even a dance tune with a steady beat has something expressive to say as it anticipates and then lands the beat notes. Pickups prepare us for those beats just like the “Ba” in the “Ba-boom” of a heartbeat, creating a pulse instead of a mere hit.

Can we even quantify exactly where the beat is in the “boom” of a heartbeat? On the “b”, the “oo”, the “m”? Maybe it’s best not to get into the weeds and analyze this. Maybe we should strive to feel the beat, keep it going, and embrace its expression. There is magic in the pulse of good music. It’s why we can’t help moving to it.

There is no formula to answer the question of how to find the precise beat. It needs to be responsive to the music, to others we play with, and to the pulse we want to embrace for each tune. The best musicians pay close attention at all times to the pulse they create, and never take it for granted.

As I said at the beginning, learners need to know the basics of how to find and play the beat of the tunes they’re working with. We’ll talk about this next time — finding the beat, whether by feel or on paper.