Meanspeed™ Music Journal: The Meanest Speed, Defined: Steely Dan's "The Boston Rag" - Mathematical Psychology Exposes That Which Is Emoted

These are charts that reflect the calibration of a song by Steely Dan called The Boston Rag.

The Boston Rag is an excellent way to understand the mean speed theory of music, as it, well, just has that Meanspeed sound - songs that have a mean speed of 77-78 beats per minute, to be precise, the square root of 60 seconds x 10-1, 77.459666... at .77459666... seconds in between beats.

Why this formula works to a near perfection: I do not know. I only noticed this clear, simple obvious pattern - the one that no real "famous" musicians will support. You can only guess why. Steely Dan, come on dudes, give it up for this work! If you can not hear the meanspeed in the 99 cents, write us at meanspeedmusic@mac.com, we will gift you a song of your choice - seriously.

These are the calibrations precisely as they appear on the synthesized graphs, all by Ian Schneider and Hunter Newman

Even after 10,000 calibrations, even though I am the president of the Kendall Park Drum Circle: am not very good at guessing what speed of a song is without the aid of a stopwatch. This is not just a confession of how I do not possess “perfect tempo”—it is also a statement about how well speed hides. Well, at least that is the excuse for my lack of precise speed guessing.
As I’ve noted, the pattern of the twelve emotion ranges have not changed since I saw the pattern in July 1988. In July 1995, I was at a friend’s house, Paul of Pennsylvania. During the party, this song came on the party playlist, and I felt something was going on with the speed. Sure enough, The Boston Rag is an ideal example of the way to hear and feel the most central of all speeds. The plot is the classic Bittersweet plot: City in Massachusetts once had this great newspaper, The “Boston Rag,” and the song becomes a call to bring back the [old Boston]. Familiar sentiment—and frankly, yet not having spoken to either member of “the Dan,” I really don’t know what either Becker or Fagan really “meant” in this most fantastic performance of a most excellent song.

The mean speed, or the speed of the song expressed as beats per minute on this live recording=77.1 beats per minute
The mean time between each beat=778 milliseconds
The mean slow phase=1.285 beats per seocnd.
The corresponding tone=328.96 Hertz, located 45 cents above D#4/Eb4= 311.127 Hertz and 55 cents below F4= 349.225 Hertz
album=Countdown to Ecstasy
Kind=AAC audio file
Bit Rate=128 kbps
Sample Rate=44.100 kHz
Size=5.5 MB
Profile=Low Complexity
Channels=Stereo
FairPlay Version=2

The graph is based on a spreadsheet generated with this method: a) I calibrated groups of every single measure (four quarter-notes) ten times with Seiko 300-lap stopwatches; b) Ten trials were averaged, coordinated and synthesized. I the created the speed graph in Microsoft's Excel for MacIntosh 2004 on an Apple iBook G4 as hardware. One of the graphs derived from the results, in a radar graph style was printed on an Epson CX4600, scanned on same printing device.

Coffee courtesy of Meredith and Jeff Schneider of TexasRoast.com