> An interactive tool with audio examples demonstrating downbeats, offbeats, and different swing ratios can be found on our website (https://www.ds.mpg.de/swing/swingratio).
This is great!
This is great!
I set it to 0.7 and listened, and now my brain hurts a lot.
I can't really dance, but if I try to twitch or spasm in my seat in time with the music I find that I'm most conformable doing one movement per quarter note. The tempo is fast enough that I can't really keep up if I try to do a movement per eighth note.
With the swing ratio set to 1 I find it easy to get out of phase in those sections where it has a bunch of consecutive eighth notes. The tempo is fast enough that I can't dance and count reliably at the same time, so if I get out of phase I'm stuck that way until it hits a section with longer notes.
There's no way to tell if a given eighth note is the downbeat or not just from its relation to the preceding or following notes so I can't reorient myself.
With higher swing ratios the downbeat note and the preceding note are grouped, and the gap between these groups is larger than the gap in the group. I can't get lost in that.
If the tempo was slower, I could either count while dancing or dance to eight notes and would be fine with a swing ratio of 1.