ABSTRACT
This chapter explores empirical investigations to examine the ways in which microtiming and rhythmic structure in Afro-Cuban musical performance are informed and constrained by the rhythmic framework of clave. The surface rhythm of clave is a repeating pattern consisting of five notes distributed across two bars. Researchers have typically relied on corpus analyses to provide evidence of the role of rhythmic frameworks in informing and constraining musical composition and improvisation. Several published studies have investigated microtiming patterns in the context of various rhythmic frameworks. The rhythmic structure portion of the analysis examined all of the MIDI data in the seven-song set with the exception of the percussion parts performing the surface clave pattern. The microtiming portion of the analysis focused on the human-performed piano data. While the average asynchrony varied from position to position, it was fairly consistent between the sides of clave. The variance of asynchrony was calculated for each metric position, in similar fashion to the average asynchrony.
