Ray Charles – GEORGIA ON MY MIND, 63.5 bpm – #44 the on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest – Seeing Tempo with graphs and controlling your mind. Really.

The song which ranks #44 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time is called “Georgia On My Mind” by the late Ray Charles.

I measured the speeds of the Charles ultra-classic using a Seiko 300 lap stopwatch which facilitates contiguous calibrations. James C.C. Manning supervised.

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
beats counted=220
mean time=3 minutes, 28.0 seconds
meanspeed=63.5 beats per minute
average beat=945 milliseconds
meanemotion according to meanspeed music theory=ceremony (songs between 63-69 beats per minute).

In order to see the speed, let us look at the measurements I entered into Microsoft’s Excel 2004 spreadsheet program. The first sheet shows the measurements of 10 trials of the first 15 of 55 contiguous measures of 4 quarter-notes were entered and subsequently synthesized by James The Senator Manning–

Spreadsheet of contiguous measures of 4 quarter-notes in contiguous measurements were entered and subsequently synthesized by James C.C. Manning. Excel spreadsheet by Ian Schneider on which the measurements of 10 trials of the measures entered and subsequently synthesized by James C.C/ Manning

An excellent article by the folks at “The Stone” about the Ray Charles song appears at
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6595889/georgia_on_my_mind

Ian Schneider
James The Senator Manning
Meanspeed Music
March 27, 2008

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