The swing study doesn't surprise Nina — who, by the way, sings and plays several instruments — because we're able to hear and make sense of sounds that are much faster than these soloist delays all the time.
The weeping notes of a trumpet saeta, an Easter tradition that once inspired a Miles Davis recording, had to be performed from the soloist's apartment balcony.
Theo's team devised a perceptual experiment that would determine if listeners preferred swing with microtiming delays by soloists and what kind of delays they preferred.
The researchers also used the newly available Weimer Jazz Database to establish that most swing soloists are in fact deliberately using these microtiming delays.