Tempo in Decentralized Music Cultures

This project pairs Sacred Harp Minutes data with a custom-designed beat tracking system to analyze how tempos selected by leaders at Sacred Harp singings vary across time and place.

The project uses minutes research data to systematically identify songs from The Sacred Harp represented in a growing corpus of recordings of Sacred Harp singings. The initial phase of the project used a dataset featuring 3,890 song recordings. The project’s beat tracking system analyzes the recordings, identifying pulse, and then drawing on musical information about the songs to map pulses to measures of music.

Singers at Sacred Harp singings take turns leading songs and have discretion over tempo. The 1844 Sacred Harp prescribed tempos in seconds per measure for each of the book’s seven “modes” or “moods of time,” though as music educator Allen Britton noted in 1949, “whether or not the exact tempos ascribed to the various signs was strictly observed in practice we cannot tell.” A 1911 revision to the book’s introduction removed these instructions. The Sacred Harp today captures this ambiguity, noting that “the mode of time is a guide to tempo. … Even so, tempo is at the discretion of the leader.”

1. NEW GEORGIA (p. 534), sung at a slower 4/4 tempoSacred Harp SingersDuration: 3:46
2. MY BRIGHTEST DAYS (p. 546), sung at a faster 4/4 tempoSacred Harp SingersDuration: 1:16

This project assess two elements of conventional wisdom among singers:

1. That tempos have increased during the twentieth century. Our preliminary research indicates that tempos for some moods of time have indeed increased, but that observed tempos for a majority are remarkably close to original prescriptions.
2. That tempos range across Sacred Harp’s traditional geography, from faster times in West Alabama to slower times in Middle and South Georgia. As our corpus grows, and as we improve our mapping of Sacred Harp, we are beginning to be able to measure regional variations.

Our research into tempo at Sacred Harp singings is contributing to our understanding of how musical features relate to temporal, geographic, and cultural contexts of decentralized music making. The project also suggests new approaches to extracting tempo information from beat onset data and structuring corpora used to evaluate beat tracking systems.

Project team members have presented research on tempo in Sacred Harp singing at the Analytical Approaches to World Music Conference.

Project Team

• Jesse P. Karlsberg, lead researcher
• Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer