Many people say that tempo can be discerned by a "beat extractor" at a rate of 17 million songs per second. If you are interested in mass tempo labeling such as this, I suggest you get onto Mixmeister or any of the thousands of such freeware programs and do that. What can you do once you know a song's speed?


*Why* would you want to know the speeds of the songs in your collection? As we say in our conjecture, speed itself has an inexplicable territoriality. In songs that in that average in tempo in the range of 106-113 beats per minute I have found that the emotion is lust in every variety, very often sexual. Sometimes the lust is more generalized, as in Purple Haze, as in the Wikipedia definition: "Lust is any intense desire or craving for gratification and excitement."




Purple Haze is shown hear in contiguous groups of 4 beats. After over thirty-five years, you cannot go on stage as a guitarist and not know this standard. The chord progression: as simple as it gets: A-->C--->D. Hendrix's ability to take such a simple and harmonically "rule-breaking" (the parallel fifths!!) vamp and turn it into a rock anthem for the ages is testament to Jimi's unique guitar and musical ability. Purple Haze is: true rock and roll STANDARD.








The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

17. Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix

18. Maybellene, Chuck Berry

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
beats per trial=300
mean time calibrated per trial=2 minutes, 45 seconds
mean speed/objective tempo=109.3 beats per minute
mean space/average beat=0.549 seconds per beat
mean emotion according to the meanspeed conjecture=lust



Ian Andrew Schneider
July 3, 2008

Labels: 109 bpm, bpm PURPLE HAZE, cognitive tempo, Jimi Hendrix, manic depression, music psychology, Purple Haze, Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time, Speed of Lust