To Err Is Most Definitely Human

They're jamming on drums at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.  Of course they are.

Their latest test subject listens to a metronome through headphones, and plays in time for about five minutes.  Except he's a little ahead or behind the metronome by 10 to 20 milliseconds, and that's what these physicists are literally counting on.  Scientists want to know if these errors random, or able to be charted and calculated with a mathematical law? And if they kick the drummer out of the band, whose van can they use to get to gigs...

When the drummer’s playing errors were correlated across long timescales, the given beat depended not just on the timing of the previous beat,sometimes on beats that occurred minutes before. “You can have these trends, for example, where the drummer plays ahead of the beat for 30 consecutive beats, while half a minute earlier, he tended to play slightly behind the metronome clicks, " said the quite Germanic named Holger Hennig.  The patterns of fluctuations are likely to be repeated, and can be found in both short and long pattern lengths, or as he described, "As a fractal — a self-similar structure.”

Using audio software to "humanize” computer-generated music by introducing these bio-rhythmic deviations, they surveyed listeners with both a “random-error” method and a “long-range-correlated-error” method (where the timing of the beats was related). 79% said the correlated-error version “sounded more precise,” and 64% of participants preferred it to the random-error version.  I may also be a drummer, but that's 143%...scientists, tell us what it means!

"There are different clocks in the brain,” Hennig explained, “clocks on different timescales, like circadian clocks on a 24-hour timescale. However, for the millisecond regime it is totally unknown which neuronal network allows the human to be so precise.” So these deviations in rhythm patterns are both intrinsic and preferred? Apparently so, and the same long-range correlations discovered in musical rhythm have been found in the fluctuation of human brainwaves and in heart rates during sleep.  Scientists are continuing to look at the neurological  circumstances that create and bio-rhythmic patterns to further understand them.