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Basically just slow spider walks with a heavy focus on the lightest touch possible to produce a clean sound, that and proper hand position. I’ll use this technique with scales aswell, like E Phrygian, also with light hammer ons than in reverse with pull offs. I like to use my thumb with a rest stroke aswell as Picado for these to mix it up.
Basically just slow spider walks with a heavy focus on the lightest touch possible to produce a clean sound, that and proper hand position. I’ll use this technique with scales aswell, like E Phrygian, also with light hammer ons than in reverse with pull offs. I like to use my thumb with a rest stroke aswell as Picado for these to mix it up.
spider walks? I think I've done something called "spider" exercises before, I can't really remember, I think I've forgotten them. Basically left hand exercises....
"heavy focus on the lightest touch"
E Phrygian, left hand ligados, pulgar apoyando and picado, all basic stuff, and using "the lightest touch possible to produce a clean sound, that and proper hand position" which is par for the course anyway... so why "intonation"?
Basically just slow spider walks with a heavy focus on the lightest touch possible to produce a clean sound, that and proper hand position. I’ll use this technique with scales aswell, like E Phrygian, also with light hammer ons than in reverse with pull offs. I like to use my thumb with a rest stroke aswell as Picado for these to mix it up.
spider walks? I think I've done something called "spider" exercises before, I can't really remember, I think I've forgotten them. Basically left hand exercises....
"heavy focus on the lightest touch"
E Phrygian, left hand ligados, pulgar apoyando and picado, all basic stuff, and using "the lightest touch possible to produce a clean sound, that and proper hand position" which is par for the course anyway... so why "intonation"?
Yup the basics, though I guess I got my terms crossed. When we use the lightest touch possible to create a clean sound on the fret, or when there is not enough pressure and you get a buzz...what is that called? I like to do scales with an intentional buzz than again with slightly more pressure to get a feel for how much pressure is required as a warm up exercise.
I’m so fast I melt the nylon without lube. Hard being me!
So this gives me an excuse to post a clip from a great film called "The Legend of 1900". At this point in the film, there is a final round of a piano duel between a real-life jazz pianist, Jelly Roll Morton, and the fictional character "1900" who is a brilliant piano player who has lived all his life on a large passenger ship.
At the point the scene below starts, Jelly Roll Morton has just played something that astounded the public, all while leaving a lit cigarette on the edge of the piano which burned almost through without disintegrating; he's picked it up after that in triumph.
This below is 1900's response. After the first minute or so, you can skip the actual piece if desired, to about 2:36 to see the pay-off. I promise it is related to your comment
When we use the lightest touch possible to create a clean sound on the fret, or when there is not enough pressure and you get a buzz...what is that called?
The first would be good technique, the second not so good!
I don't think there is a name for the specific practise of learning to use only the minimal amount of left hand pressure required to fret the note and no more, other than it's an important part of learning to play with good technique.
Like the principle of "minimal movement" you could call it "minimal pressure" or "minimal effort" maybe.
When I was learning the Interactive Teaching Method Alexander Technique the whole thing was about preventing unnecessary muscle tension, and by doing so performing whatever activity was focused on with only the minimal necessary amount of effort, and no more.
I don't know, you seem to have a good base; if you have a great flamenco teacher to fix and guide your technique you should be able to get to 150ish within a few years, provided there are no mechanical impediments or injuries.
I don't know, you seem to have a good base; if you have a great flamenco teacher to fix and guide your technique you should be able to get to 150ish within a few years, provided there are no mechanical impediments or injuries.
This is good to hear, im doing an online module based program with monthly video submissions right now. So far it’s been great, it’s a 2-3 year program, though when im done i will likely seek out a teacher either through zoom or in person. Has anyone ever heard of Oscar-Jose Garcia? They are Canadian, Apparently him and his wife were a big deal in Los Angeles a few years ago. He teaches in my area while his wife teaches dance.
I’m so fast I melt the nylon without lube. Hard being me!
So this gives me an excuse to post a clip from a great film called "The Legend of 1900". At this point in the film, there is a final round of a piano duel between a real-life jazz pianist, Jelly Roll Morton, and the fictional character "1900" who is a brilliant piano player who has lived all his life on a large passenger ship.
At the point the scene below starts, Jelly Roll Morton has just played something that astounded the public, all while leaving a lit cigarette on the edge of the piano which burned almost through without disintegrating; he's picked it up after that in triumph.
This below is 1900's response. After the first minute or so, you can skip the actual piece if desired, to about 2:36 to see the pay-off. I promise it is related to your comment
Movies about musicians always get on my nerves . They try to make the drama happen in those type of scenes and for anybody that plays the exact opposite thing happens.
Watch at 15:58
And honestly the rest of this video, starting with the practicing method stuff at the start, is good for developing speed etc.
So this gives me an excuse to post a clip from a great film called "The Legend of 1900"
Ha! How about that! What a coincidence. Have never heard of this movie. Worth the watch? Speaking of musician movies, real or not, I did like the Whiplash movie.
Chick - I like how he starts the vid with his Scientology “technology” application to his studies lol. I always thought Scientology is mostly sort of BS but some of these celebrities who got out of the cult say some of the stuff was super useful with communication skills and such.
So this gives me an excuse to post a clip from a great film called "The Legend of 1900"
Ha! How about that! What a coincidence. Have never heard of this movie. Worth the watch?
It is one of my favourite movies. Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. You might have heard about or seen some of his other films, like "Cinema Paradiso", "Malena", "Baaria", or "The Best Offer".
"The Legend of 1900" is a story in the best sense of "Once upon a time.." - woven out of Tornatore's vivid imagination, sweet and tragic, funny and spectacular, a love story in several senses. It is also about a baby boy, discovered in 1900 on an ocean liner, who grows into a musical prodigy, never setting foot on land - so it has marvelous musical sequences.
Since "1900" never existed, the musical pieces composed by 1900 were by Ennio Morricone; other musical pieces in it are by the real-life characters who make an appearance, like Jelly Roll Morton. Because it is Tornatore with Lajos Koltai behind the camera, we also get amazing visual sequences and overall dream-like atmosphere and rich colours.
I want to ask foro, all things being equal, is there any difference between picado at 160 and 200 bpm acoustically?
Not sure if this is what you mean, but the resolution of the human auditory system drops off pretty sharply at 10 discrete sounds per second. Faster than that and it starts to sound like a continuous buzz. At 160 bpm 16th notes you're already going faster than 10 discrete sounds per second, so you can't process everything as discrete sounds. And at 200 bpm it's even harder to process.
Context is important. Not a definitive truth, but what seems to allow us to process sounds at that speed is that we're already familiar with the genre, the scales it uses, etc. That way you can "chunk" bundles of individual sounds into larger units that can be processed. A sort of "good enough" understanding of what is going on, even if we no longer hear each individual sound. BTW, the same thing happens with language. Natural speech usually falls somewhere between 10-15 phonemes per second. The human auditory system shouldn't be able to process more than 10 phonemes per second. And yet we do just that. The idea is that we're able to do that because we're no longer processing each sound as an individual unit, but instead we chunk them into larger units, in part through anticipatory processes.
There's probably some parallel to be made there with how people practice fast picado runs. You break down into smaller parts. You do one bit, get that up to speed to the point that it feels like "just one thing", and then you add another bit.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
I want to ask foro, all things being equal, is there any difference between picado at 160 and 200 bpm acoustically?
Not sure if this is what you mean, but the resolution of the human auditory system drops off pretty sharply at 10 discrete sounds per second. Faster than that and it starts to sound like a continuous buzz. At 160 bpm 16th notes you're already going faster than 10 discrete sounds per second, so you can't process everything as discrete sounds. And at 200 bpm it's even harder to process.
Context is important. Not a definitive truth, but what seems to allow us to process sounds at that speed is that we're already familiar with the genre, the scales it uses, etc. That way you can "chunk" bundles of individual sounds into larger units that can be processed. A sort of "good enough" understanding of what is going on, even if we no longer hear each individual sound. BTW, the same thing happens with language. Natural speech usually falls somewhere between 10-15 phonemes per second. The human auditory system shouldn't be able to process more than 10 phonemes per second. And yet we do just that. The idea is that we're able to do that because we're no longer processing each sound as an individual unit, but instead we chunk them into larger units, in part through anticipatory processes.
There's probably some parallel to be made there with how people practice fast picado runs. You break down into smaller parts. You do one bit, get that up to speed to the point that it feels like "just one thing", and then you add another bit.
That 10 per second thing is absolute nonsense. There would exist no tight groove above a slow merengue. Everything would be a mushy ‘chunking” rhythm. .
I remember an old arguement about David Cerredula playing Entre dos Aguas. And I argued that he was going faster than 6’s (12 nps) because I was quite used to those and what he did was much faster. I assumed it was 8’s (16nps). Grisha and Todd argued against me that they were definantly not 8’s. Years later that thing still bugged me and i slowed it down….he was doing 7’s (14nps)
There would exist no tight groove above a slow merengue. Everything would be a mushy ‘chunking” rhythm.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Chick - I like how he starts the vid with his Scientology “technology” application to his studies lol. I always thought Scientology is mostly sort of BS but some of these celebrities who got out of the cult say some of the stuff was super useful with communication skills and such.
I realize I carelessly ignored that intro statement with a “whatever nut” in the back of my mind. I want to come clean that I don’t advocate that stuff by posting that video. Chick had a lot of falling out with great artists in his life because of the crazy cult of Scientology. He was OT8 two times over and worse, they believe mind over healing cancer etc, and he died of some ‘rare” cancer. Mclaughlin avoided work with Chick for some 30 years, probably due to having had his own bad cult experiences, and Dimeola, who adores Chick and his music, sued him in 2009 after RTF reunion and apparently won the settlement out of court. Yikes.
He was OT8 two times over and worse, they believe mind over healing cancer etc, and he died of some ‘rare” cancer. Mclaughlin avoided work with Chick for some 30 years, probably due to having had his own bad cult experiences, and Dimeola, who adores Chick and his music, sued him in 2009 after RTF reunion and apparently won the settlement out of court. Yikes.
Clearly he wasn’t ‘clear enough’ or we would have lived forever. He probably needed further audits to purge out remaining thetans
Natural speech usually falls somewhere between 10-15 phonemes per second. The human auditory system shouldn't be able to process more than 10 phonemes per second.
Some thoughts and my own observation that seem related to this:
I would have thought there is rather a rate limit on processing chunks of spoken information/meaning - don't know what these are called, but they are not phonemes? So that a language with higher information density (roughly something like less phonemes/unit info, i.e. shorter words on average) would generally be spoken at a slower rate (of phonemes) than a language with a lower information density (longer words on average) where it can be spoken seemingly faster, yet probably the rate of information is about the same.
To clarify, I thought phonemes, in a perfect phonetic language, would be exactly the same number as the letters of that language, so then the number of phonemes would just equal the numbers of letters; whereas the words or phrases are what transmits units of meaning/information. Or am I mixing things up?
So back to sounds, the other thing it that my own experience runs against having a rate limit of processing at 10, let's say notes per second. Which would be like not being able to distinguish anything beyond 150bpm, 4 notes per click. It seems from experience that things up to 15-16 notes per second are still audible individually (thus processed) - this would be 225-240 bpm, 4 per click, or sextuplets at 150-160 bpm.
I also notice that as I get better at picado, my subjective sense of time can slow down while within the picado phrase (metronome seems to click slower as if there is plenty of time to fit my 4 or 6 notes per click) - it seems time is flowing more slowly while in the run than after which is probably indicative of my brain getting better at distinguishing and processing the commands - as if increasing the max rate of processing possible. When Ricardo mentions being able to hear a phrase as a precursor to try to play it, that seems to refer to the same concept of rate of processing.
I would have thought there is rather a rate limit on processing chunks of spoken information/meaning - don't know what these are called, but they are not phonemes?
Right. I guess it's a bit of a messy topic, but basically phonemes are considered the basic unit of meaning because of their contrastive value. For instance, how do you know whether I said bat or cat, desk or disk, fan or van, etc.? In each case there's only one sound that changes, and since it has the power to contrast different words that way, it's considered a phoneme. So it's in that sense that phonemes are considered to carry information. Note that you can have sounds that are different but don't have any contrastive value. Those are called allophones. For instance, in English [p] (as in the p in "lip") and [ph] (as in the p in "pit") are allophones of the phoneme /p/. They're different sounds, but they have no contrastive value. In the minds of English speakers they're both conceptualized as just a "p" and many may not even realize they're pronouncing them differently. Note that phonemes are language specific. While [p] and [ph] are not phonemes in English, they are in Icelandic, for example.
If you're doing purely acoustic phonetics, without worrying about meaning, the basic unit is a "phone". You can think of phones as the assortment of all the different sounds that make up human language. Nothing language specific here, [p] and [ph] are phones regardless of which language they show up in and regardless of whether they have any contrastive value. It's really just two different approaches to the same subject matter, one focused solely on acoustics, and the other focused on meaning and functionality.
Re: auditory processing dropping off around 10 sounds per second, I'll have to go check. I probably got ahead of myself by saying it sounds like a "continuous buzz". I remember Adam Neely's videos on rhythm vs pitch. The literature he was citing said that the perception of rhythm shifts into perception of pitch at around 50ms intervals, so 20 notes per second. And even there, personally even if I can't really perceive it as rhythm anymore, I do perceive that it's not just one uninterrupted sound. I'll have to go check, but I think the 10 value was more on whether you can "make sense" of what you're hearing enough to remember it. So, like, if I played 10 different sounds in a second, would you be able to tell afterwards what those sounds were, in what order they occurred, etc. I think the example Ricardo gives of three professional guitarists not being quite sure how many notes there were is an example of that. They're still hearing different sounds, but there's a drop in resolution.
What the chunking model of language posits is that you have different levels of representation at varying levels of abstraction, operating in parallel. At the sensory level you have this flow of input that keeps on coming. That input is transient and your memory only allows you to handle so much of it at any given moment. So before you "lose" input to the new input that is coming in on that basic sensory level, you want to chunk it and pass it up to a higher level of representation. They posit that only information in the same level of representation can interfere with each other. So the input you just passed up to a higher level of representation isn't erased by the incoming input at the lower level of representation. And the further you get from the immediate sensory input, the more time you have to process chunks.
So, once you've chunked "super" and "cali" into "supercali", theoretically there's no risk that the incoming "fragi" could interfere with it. Only "fragilistic" and "expiali" could. You keep keep chunking up to higher levels, perhaps not simultaneously, but with a sort of cascading effect, e.g. while you're chunking "expi" and "ali" in one level, you might be chunking "supercali" and "fragilistic" in another level. And you keep on doing that game of chunking and passing it upwards until you have the full word. Then you can apply the same process to sentences and larger units of meaning. Anticipation would also play a role to facilitate the process. In this case, as soon as you hear "supercali", you probably already know what the rest of the word is going to be.
Anyway, it's just a way of trying to explain how we process fast, transient linguistic input given the limitations of human memory. Whether we can extrapolate some of it to music, I don't know. Intuitively I feel like there are many similarities there, especially with regards to the role of anticipation. I'm not sure we could process sounds very well at those speeds if they didn't follow the patterns we expect them to follow due to our past experience of listening to music. But who knows.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
It is starting to make more sense now. So when you say “10” in music, my first thought is about rhythm vs individual notes. So I think what I am thinking are the allophones should not be limited to 10. Whereas the thing you actually refer to– “phonemes”– are a kin to the individual precise note pitches, and perhaps what fret they are on etc…is limited to 10 PITCHES per second. That would make sense to me, and explains why we need to slow down recordings to make transcriptions, period.
Here is another good one, they groove very fast on this track with 16ths, but at 16:02 he launches into a smooth 16 notes per second and while i can sense the sextuplet divisions easily, the actual note pitches I couldn’t tell without slowing it down.
Looks like a fairly common reference for this number is Miller, G.A. and Taylor, W.G. (1948). The perception of repeated bursts of noise. doi: 10.1121/1.1906360 (sci-hub cough cough ^^).
I need to give this a slow read since it's outside my own area. But a snippet from the discussion section after a cursory reading:
"The results of these experiments can be summarized by a description of the perceptual changes which occur as the rate of interruption of a random noise is increased from a very slow to a very rapid rate. At very slow rates the noise comes, persist, decays to threshold, is followed by a period of silence, and then comes on again. When the rate is increased to 10 to 15 interruptions per second, the successive bursts begin to fuse in a manner similar to the fusion obtained with sinusoidal waves. The pitch character of the noise beings to emerge and is quite distinct for most listeners at interruption rates of 40 per second."
Further:
"Below about 10 per second, the bursts can probably be regarded as separate events with little interaction upon one another. Miller has presented evidence supporting the notion that perceptual decay of a noise is complete in about 60-65 msec. for most listeners. Thus at 10 bursts per second, with a sound-time fraction of 0.5, the perceptual decay of one burst would not be completed before the next burst occurs, and the neural processes representing the successive bursts should begin to tread upon each other's heels and to fuse into a steady train."
"Bursts per second" aren't the only variable here, so I'm not quite sure why this would be used as a reference value. I'll have to go digging around to figure out more.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Re: auditory processing dropping off around 10 sounds per second, I'll have to go check. I probably got ahead of myself by saying it sounds like a "continuous buzz". I remember Adam Neely's videos on rhythm vs pitch. The literature he was citing said that the perception of rhythm shifts into perception of pitch at around 50ms intervals, so 20 notes per second. And even there, personally even if I can't really perceive it as rhythm anymore, I do perceive that it's not just one uninterrupted sound.
Thanks for the paper reference in your subsequent post. I read it and, from a musical perspective, what you wrote in the quoted above covers it better than if one starts to extrapolate something about ability to discern musical notes if at a rate of more than 10 notes/second.
The 1948 paper examined several different questions. Here they are playing with white noise, which I mention as it is important when trying to gain insight about rate of musical notes; not saying this is irrelevant to musical notes, just important to keep in mind what the study was about.
One question was about at what flutter rate (noise-silence alternation) the flutter starts becoming indistinguishable from continuous noise. That was found to be dependent on sound volume for a given noise-sound fraction, but given enough volume the difference was distinguishable up to a rate of about 2,000/sec. This is where they reference the neural attenuation in the neural signal mimicking the input, and the number of 10/sec comes up - beyond that the neural signal has not attenuated to zero before the next noise starts. But that doesn't mean we cannot sense there were pauses (hence detection of differences up to the 2000/sec) - because we can still detect SOME attenuation. The important limiting factor then is that we cannot detect an attenuation smaller than about 0.4dB. This is equivalent, for a half/half noise/silence pulse, to a flutter rate of about 2000/sec.
Another question they examined is whether listeners perceive a pitch corresponding to the flutter rate of the white noise. Below about 10-15/sec they did not, explanation being that those are perceived as completely separate events with no overlap, so no reason for the brain to be tricked into perceiving it as a sinusoidal oscillation thus a pitched sound. Then, between 20/sec and 250/sec, there is a pitch perception due to the overlap and mimicking a sinusoidal simple wave. But then beyond 250/sec that perception disappears again. This is explained by the finite time it takes - about 5 ms - for a pulse to travel the length of the cochlear duct in the ear to be spectrum-analyzed by the basilar membrane (highest frequencies are first; lowest frequencies last, with 5 mili-seconds lag).
So beyond a flutter rate of 100/sec (a 5ms pulse means a total noise/silence interval of 10ms) the previous pulse is still being analyzed by parts of the membrane while the new one is already arriving. We can still assign a pitch but it deteriorates. At 250/sec pulses arrive at 2ms intervals and now too much of the membrane is getting overlapped by subsequent pulses. So we can't reliably associate a pitch to that anymore. But we can still tell it is not continuous noise.
So lastly, the limit to losing the perception of flutter is at about 2000/sec, which is a 0.25ms pulse (0.5 ms total noise+silence unit) because this is the time it takes for a neural attenuation of at least 0.4dB. Faster rate means less than 0.4 dB attenuation and thus losing the ability to perceive a difference between the noise part and the silence part => perception of continuous noise.
This is how far I got this morning. So far this particular paper has more applicability to, say, drumming as drumming sound has a noise quality to it (not a harmonic sound); it also interestingly coincides with the fast drumming contests results where the upper limit seem to be around 2000 strokes/min - but that may be a coincidence as other factors are involved there.
I don't think what is in this paper, at least, can be interpreted as a limit of 10 musical notes/sec regarding pitch or perception of separate notes; it is a bit like apples and oranges. Maybe the 5ms travel time on the basilar membrane to analyze frequencies and thus the deterioration beyond 100 pulses/sec is relevant. I'll try to find something that focuses on investigating limits of human perception in the context of musical notes.
fast drumming contests results where the upper limit seem to be 2000 strokes/sec
Is that a typo, should be 2000/minute?
Not sure of the reliability of guinness world records, but they have it at 2370/minute or 39.5 beats per second for drumming with sticks. Measured drummed sustained for 1 minute.
fast drumming contests results where the upper limit seem to be 2000 strokes/sec
Is that a typo, should be 2000/minute?
Not sure of the reliability of guinness world records, but they have it at 2370/minute or 39.5 beats per second for drumming with sticks. Measured drummed sustained for 1 minute.
Not sure of the top speed recorded for picado 16th notes? Around 200bpm? Thats 200X16=3200/minute. But could that be sustained for 1 minute?
. The kid was not playing evenly plus, he was bouncing the sticks. The true limits for this thing, and most drummers know this, is called straight sticking or single sticking, (single stroke rolls) and is equivalent to picado or alternate picking speed contest type things, and historically hovers around 16 notes per second, in the same ball park. This would be sextuplet or 24th notes at 160 bpm, or 32nd notes at 120 bpm. Of course the idea is SUSTAINED AND CONTROLLED even rhythm at indefinite length, because most music passages that can achieve or surpass that speed are brief, and thus don’t really count either. The fastest picado I have heard was Javier Conde do Entre Dos Aguas as 109bpm (5 clicks faster than PDL). PDL fastest was Chanela 115bpm but it was not very cleanly articulated like the same runs at 104, his usual tempo. His nephew hits 117bpm in a descending scale live on Caña de Azucar. It was a short burst. All of these are a far cry from 120bpm. Cerredula (Rio Ancho 120bpm) I thought had made it was doing a 7 note pattern on each string (upon slowing down the recording), so 14nps.
The Mclaughlin picking pattern thing is much closer to 16nps however, after posting that Shakti above I slowed it down and while it projects to me as sextuplets, it might be slower like some odd meter similar to Cerredula. Paul Gilbert and other shredders do clean long lines of Sextuplets at 144bpm regularly. So I think of drummers as a few clicks faster than ANY guitar players, such that top speed shred guitar is in the ballpark of 12-14 nps on average.
Rummaging around some linguistic papers that cite Miller and that 10 value, I think it's honestly a bit sloppy. It's used to establish a background, so it's not something central to the points they're making, but nonetheless, still pretty sloppy. And sloppy on my part for just quoting that value without checking. Sorry about that!
I perused a bit of Miller's other writings, and why this is happening might be pretty simple: Miller was an early advocate of chunking models and the people who have started to revive that model for linguistic purposes in the last decade or so likely got some of their ideas from him. See for instance Miller's 1956 address "The magical number seven, plus or minus two" (doi:10.1037/h0043158). It gives a very clear overview of what this chunking business is meant to address, and includes the somewhat famous quote (well, even I had heard it anyway, even though I didn't know the source): "A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. The letters organize themselves as words, which are larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." I don't know whether Miller himself ever brought up that 10 value in the context of discussing chunking or not, but the fact that it's the same person seems pretty relevant, though of course I can't rule out it being just an odd coincidence.
My thinking so far:
1. The 10 value derived from Miller is irrelevant for picado, however the notion of interpreting individual bursts as discrete auditory events is not. Miller's study assumes equal time for noise and silence within a single pulse. That's what makes it irrelevant for us because we can toggle that ratio. For me the notion of each note being a discrete auditory event, with a beginning, a sound, followed by relative silence, is one of the key features of picado. The faster you go, the shorter each total pulse needs to be, but the silence portion of the pulse needs to remain, otherwise it won't be perceived as proper picado. We're back to the same old advice: practice staccato! There could potentially be some kind of limit where the difference between picado and not-picado starts to blur, either because we're reached some physical limits in the production of staccato, which I assume is more demanding in movement than whatever the opposite of staccato is called, or because the silence portion of the pulse has become just too short to make any real difference (where you'd have to look at the decay of the sound waves staccato vs not staccato, taking into account at which point we cease to be able to perceive the difference (with perhaps a parallel to the 0.4 db mentioned by Miller).
As a side note, this aspect of it makes me even more baffled at why this is used for linguistics, the more I think of it. Language is not "played staccato". Even at very slow speeds you just don't have "discrete auditory events" that way. It is much more fluid than what Miller's study is looking at, so I don't really get what the parallel is supposed to be. If I find the time, I might write a few of these researchers to ask what their reasoning is.
2. The question of perceptual decay (which Miller sets at about 60-65ms), and the idea that there are limits to just how much information can be handled in short-term memory at any given moment still make for an interesting conundrum and would make chunking relevant in the musical context. The question of speed would then come up, not as a perceptual question of "can I distinguish this note from this other note", but more as "the signal is gone and my short-term memory is reaching its limit capacity". Something like that. I mean, even just to feel a groove, at any speed really, wouldn't memory have to play a role? How can I feel a groove if all traces from each beat disappear in 60-65ms? And if at higher speeds the amount of information exceeds the capacity of my short-term memory, how is that handled? That kind of question. But at this point I'm just spitballing.
Oh btw, the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious example was from Christiansen, not Mortensen. I keep thinking his name is Christian Mortensen, but it's Morten Christiansen lol If ever I go back into linguistics, I'm gonna change my name to Christian Mortensen just to fúck with everybody.
Apologies to trivium for going kind of off-topic. Though the "practice staccato" advice will be relevant regardless of which speeds you end up reaching.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
fast drumming contests results where the upper limit seem to be 2000 strokes/sec
Is that a typo, should be 2000/minute?
Yes, sorry about that, 2000/min of course. Will edit above. Oh, and will remove the reference too, because with that change it is apparent that I only noticed the number (2000), but the units are different, so irrelevant.
quote:
Not sure of the top speed recorded for picado 16th notes? Around 200bpm? Thats 200X16=3200/minute. But could that be sustained for 1 minute?
(You don't multiply by 16 but by how many notes per click; in your calculation it would have been 200x4)
About 230x4 demonstrated on video, so let's say 240 x 4 = 960 strokes/min, so 1000/min as a limit. But the drumming thing has to be divided by two for comparison, so it is comparable to that. Ricardo goes into more detail as it seems relevant if it is a 4-5 note burst or a 30-40 note sustained run. On the latter, Paco is on video doing 48 notes clean at 230 bpm x 4 (15.3 notes/second or 920 notes/min). Reference here: http://www.foroflamenco.com/tm.asp?m=339048&mpage=1&key=230%2Cbpm&s=#339151
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. They try to make the drama happen in those type of scenes and for anybody that plays the exact opposite thing happens. 
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