There has been no substantial quantitative research by music theorists on the use of swing in country music, even though swing is a central feature of this musical style. To address this gap, this study analyzed 750 country songs released between 1949 and 2023 to investigate trends in the use of different rhythmic subdivisions, focusing on duple (straight) and compound (swung) rhythms across two metric levels. The results revealed that duple rhythms overwhelmingly dominate the dataset, with compound subdivisions—characterized by swung first-level rhythmic patterns—declining significantly over time. Songs with swung first-level subdivisions generally exhibit faster tempos, maintaining flexibility across a broader tempo range. In contrast, swung second-level subdivisions, which emerged later, are typically associated with slower tempos and more concentrated tempo ranges in the dataset. Tempo analyses indicate a gradual overall decline in the downbeat/backbeat rate, reflected in the decreasing prevalence of faster swung first-level patterns and the subtle integration of slower second-level subdivisions in later decades. The findings underscore how rhythmic and temporal characteristics interact specifically in recorded country music, with swung rhythms becoming less prominent as country music evolved, ultimately shifting toward majority duple rhythmic structures and slower average tempos.
This is a commentary on Jason Lee’s (2025) “Tone-Melody Correspondence in Cantopop: Patterns of Directionality and Interval Size from a Corpus Study.” In it, I speculate briefly about problems with Lee’s approach to analyzing melismatic passages in his data. I then show my own simple analysis of Lee’s data.
Empirical researchers are faced with the challenge of balancing necessary reductions, especially in the form of operational definitions, with robust, meaningful data. Martin (2025) employed a common model of meter, in which periodic pulses are grouped into a hierarchy of beats and measures. This model leads to a categorical operational definition of meter as duple or triple groupings of pulses across two levels of subdivision. I contend that, while this model of meter affords practical definitions such as Martin’s, it also risks oversimplifying the task of metrical perception from the perspective of the listener, who is often faced with real-time temporal variability in the presentation of rhythms. Such limitations are exposed by Martin’s study of swing rhythms in country music. In this commentary, I use swing rhythms as a starting point to explore how some of the challenges of the real-time process of metrical perception may be missed by the metrical hierarchy model. To that end, I argue three main points: (1) it is necessary to clarify the definition of swing as it relates to rhythm and to meter; (2) it is necessary to distinguish a straight compound meter from an uneven swung rhythm; and (3) future research on meter should consider continuous measurement of factors such as duration and tempo, and how temporal variability influences meter perception.
This short commentary highlights several aspects of the target article Listener’s Perceived Emotions in Synthetic and Pitch-Randomized Music Excerpts by Poudrier et al. that are valuable for experimental studies in music psychology that investigate perceived emotions in music through computer-generated stimuli or excerpts from human performances. The importance of this study that targets the foundation of empirical research on music emotions is noted, but several critical points are raised. These include possible alternative approaches for data analysis and a discussion of the importance of different experimental parameters. Overall, this commentary concludes that the target article addresses very relevant methodological issues, but that further research is necessary to obtain a more comprehensive perspective on the range of experimental options for research on musical emotions and their potential consequences.
This commentary engages with Samuel Martin’s corpus-based study of swing usage in country music from 1949–2023. While affirming the study’s central findings, particularly the long-term decline of swing and the differentiated tempo behavior of first- and second-level subdivisions, this commentary focuses on methodological considerations that shape how these results are interpreted. Specifically, I examine decisions surrounding corpus construction, chart selection, song replacement across years, and encoding practices. The commentary further highlights the late 1980s–2000s as a period of particular interest, given anomalies in swing usage and tempo trends identified in the corpus. Possible contextual factors, including changes in industry practices, MTV, and artist dominance, are discussed as speculative avenues for future inquiry.
