Corpus-Based Rhythmic Pattern Analysis of Ragtime Syncopation

This paper presents a corpus-based study on rhythmic patterns in the RAG-collection of approximately 11.000 symbolically encoded ragtime pieces. While characteristic musical features that define ragtime as a genre have been debated since its inception, musicologists argue that specific syncopation patterns are most typical for this genre. Therefore, we investigate the use of syncopation patterns in the RAG-collection from its beginnings until the present time in this paper. Using computational methods, this paper provides an overview on the use of rhythmical patterns of the ragtime genre, thereby offering valuable new insights that complement musicological hypotheses about this genre. Specifically, we measure the amount of syncopation for each bar using Longuet-Higgins and Lee’s model of syncopation, determine the most frequent rhythmic patterns, and discuss the role of a specific short-long-short syncopation pattern that musicologists argue is characteristic for ragtime. A comparison between the ragtime (pre-1920) and modern (post-1920) era shows that the two eras differ in syncopation pattern use. Onset density and amount of syncopation increase after 1920. Moreover, our study confirms the musicological hypothesis on the important role of the short-long-short syncopation pattern in ragtime. These findings are pivotal in developing ragtime genre-specific features.