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² Son and salsa are two related complexes of popular music and dance. Son developed in the easternmost region of Cuba in the late nineteenth century and travelled throughout Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin America and other parts of the world during the twentieth century to become one of Cuba’s most valuable musical expressions. Salsa, which shares many musical features with son, emerged from New York’s Latin American musical communities in the 1960s and 70s and has its roots in Cuban and Puerto Rican popular and folkloric music and jazz. Since then it has become a multifaceted music and dance form with worldwide appeal. See Boggs, Vernon W., Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Roy, Maya, Cuban Music: From Son and Rumba to the Buena Vista Social Club and Timba Cubana (London: Latin American Bureau, 2002)Google Scholar; Fuentes, Leonardo Padura, Faces of Salsa: A Spoken History of the Music (Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003)Google Scholar; Sublette, Ned, Cuba and its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2004).Google Scholar

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¹³ Frühauf, Jan, Kopiez, Reinhard and Platz, Friedrich, ‘Music on the Timing Grid: The Influence of Microtiming on the Perceived Groove Quality of a Sample Drum Pattern Performance’, Musicae scientiae, 17 (2013), 246–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁰ Christopher Stover, ‘A Theory of Flexible Rhythmic Spaces for Diasporic African Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2009).

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²⁴ Praat was developed by Dutch academics at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam, to aid linguistic analysis, but has also been used in ethnomusicological research (for example, in Clayton, Martin, Sager, Rebecca and Will, Udo, ‘In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and its Significance for Ethnomusicology’, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 11 (2005), 3–75). Praat can be downloaded from www.fon.hum.uva/praat.Google Scholar

²⁵ Automatic detection algorithms can be used to identify onsets, which can speed up this process. Some literature, however, questions their reliability (see, for example, Leveau, Pierre, Daudet, Laurent and Richard, Gael, ‘Methodology and Tools for the Evaluation of Automatic Onset Detection Algorithms in Music’, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (Barcelona: n.p., 2004), 72–5)Google Scholar, and as I had experience of performing the rhythmic-harmonic patterns analysed and how they interlock, I used these insights to label the shared onsets by hand/ear on a smaller dataset. While being more subjective, this method is arguably more consistent.

²⁶ Sound clips of these instrumental parts in the selected extracts from the three recordings by the groups Riamba, Havana Club Descarga and Asere may be accessed in the Supplemental Material online at <sound clip 1>, <sound clip 2> and <sound clip 3> respectively. For details of the three performances, see Table 2 below.

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²⁸ Shared onsets are those that would fall at the same metric location if the two musicians were playing in exact synchrony. For example, in the sample transcription in Example 1 below, the bell and bass share onsets on metric locations 1 and 4 in the first bar, 2-and and 4 in the second bar and so on.

²⁹ Fisher, Nicholas I., Statistical Analysis of Circular Data (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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³³ ANOVA is a reliable statistical test that has been used in previous timing studies of Afro-Cuban music: see Benadon, ‘Near-Unisons in Afro-Cuban Ensemble Drumming’. T-tests were also used, which provided results very similar to those of ANOVA.

³⁴ Mauleón, Rebecca, Salsa Guidebook for Piano and Ensemble (Petaluma, CA: Sher Music, 1993)Google Scholar; Manuel, Peter, ‘Improvisation in Latin Dance Music: History and Style’, In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Music Improvisation, ed. Nettl, Bruno and Russell, Melinda (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127–47Google Scholar; Orovio, Helio, Cuban Music from A to Z (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Perna, Vincenzo, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).Google Scholar

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³⁷ Washburne, ‘Play It “Con Filin!”’, 179.

³⁸ Mauleón, Salsa Guidebook; Peñalosa, David, The Clave Matrix: Afro-Cuban Rhythm: Its Principles and African Origins (Redway, CA: Bembe Books, 2009).Google Scholar

³⁹ The term ‘clave’ is of Spanish origin, literally meaning key, clef, code or keystone. It refers simultaneously to a constantly repeated rhythmic pattern and to the musical instrument (cylindrical hardwood sticks) on which the rhythm is played.

⁴⁰ Amira, John and Cornelius, Steven, The Music of Santería: Traditional Rhythms of the Batá Drum (Crown Point, IN: White Cliffs Media Co., 1992)Google Scholar; Peñalosa, The Clave Matrix; Stover, ‘A Theory of Flexible Rhythmic Spaces’; Godfried Toussaint, The Geometry of Musical Rhythm (Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2013).

⁴¹ Washburne, ‘Play It “Con Filin!”’, 162.

⁴² Mauleón, Rebecca, 101 montunos (Petaluma, CA: Sher Music, 1999), 7 Google Scholar; Pressing, Jeff, ‘Black Atlantic Rhythm: Its Computational and Transcultural Foundations’, Music Perception, 19 (2002), 285–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agawu, Kofi, ‘Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Competing Perspectives on the “Standard Pattern” of West African Rhythm’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59 (2006), 1–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peñalosa, The Clave Matrix, 158.

⁴³ Pressing, ‘Black Atlantic Rhythm’, 289.

⁴⁴ Manuel, Peter, ‘Anticipated Bass in Cuban Popular Music’, Ethnomusicology, 6 (1985), 249–61 (p. 249).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid., 255.

⁴⁶ Fitch, Tecumseh W., ‘Dance, Music, Meter and Groove: A Forgotten Partnership’, Frontiers in Psychology, 10 (2016), 1–7 (p. 5).Google ScholarPubMed

⁴⁷ Manuel, ‘Anticipated Bass in Cuban Popular Music’, 255.

⁴⁸ In 1959, Ira Hirsh argued that a separation time of ‘between 15 and 20 msec is required for the listener to report correctly which of the two sounds preceded the other’. Hirsh, , ‘Auditory Perception of Temporal Order’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31 (1959), 759–67 (p. 759)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although ±20 ms is used here as a convenient and widely quoted timing threshold, I agree with other scholars that this is largely arbitrary and that the threshold is probably lower at around 10 ms for expert listeners and musicians. See, for example, Benadon, ‘Near-Unisons in Afro-Cuban Ensemble Drumming’, 189.

⁴⁹ Rasch, Rudolph A., ‘Timing and Synchronization in Ensemble Performance’, Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation and Composition, ed. Sloboda, John A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 70–90 Google Scholar; Hellmer, Kahel and Madison, Guy, ‘Quantifying Micro-timing Patterning and Variability in Drum Kit Recordings: A Method and Some Data’, Music Perception, 33 (2014), 147–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁰ Andy Martin, interview, 30 March 2009.

⁵¹ Hamish Balfour, interview, 9 April 2009.

⁵² Mauleón, Salsa Guidebook, 69; Peñalosa, The Clave Matrix, 95.

⁵³ Mauleón, Salsa Guidebook, 201.

⁵⁴ Washburne, Christopher, ‘Salsa Romántica: An Analysis of Style’, Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meaning in Latin Popular Music, ed. Waxer, Lise (New York: Routledge, 2002), 101–32 (p. 120).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Manuel, ‘Improvisation in Latin Dance Music’, 133.

⁵⁶ Elpidio Caicedo, interview, 16 February 2010.

⁵⁷ Sara McGuinness, interview, 23 December 2009.

⁵⁸ Christopher Washburne, ‘Play It “Con Filin!”’, 175.

⁵⁹ Doffman, ‘Making It Groove!’

⁶⁰ Michel Salazar, interview, 23 July 2010.

⁶¹ Tres player. The Cuban tres is a guitar-like instrument with three pairs of strings.

⁶² Changüí is a musical genre that originated in the Guantánamo region in the east of Cuba. Although related in style and evolution to son, it ‘constitutes a unique complex of music, dance, and social behaviour’. Lapidus, Benjamin, ‘The Changüí Genre of Guantánamo, Cuba’, Ethnomusicology, 49 (2005), 49–74 (p. 69).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶³ Adolfo Gonzalez, interview (translated from Spanish), 23 July 2010.

⁶⁴ Mauleón, 101 montunos, 31.