The Rolling Stones are the most famous and most influential rock band over the past 100 years?
This image is part of what I call a Matherton Tempo Illustration — a tempo chart that I made to help me understand a song, not only by its harmony and melody, but also by its speed. A lot of people wonder what these pictures are for — they’re just to help people. There’s no sales pitch, no product behind it.
Instead of just saying “the tempo is 128 BPM,” this kind of chart shows how the pace actually moves — moment by moment — the way a real performance does. You can see when things subtly speed up or slow down, which might be useful if you’re a musician figuring out the groove, or someone exercising to a beat, or even just trying to feel more connected to the music.
What You’re Looking At:
• The blue line shows the tempo as it moves in real time — how fast or slow each part of the song feels as it goes.
• The red line is the same data, but sorted from slowest to fastest, just to make the overall range easier to see.
• The straight black lines are trend lines — kind of a way to see whether things tend to speed up or slow down across the song overall.
The median tempo (basically the middle point of all the speed changes) is about 128.8 beats per minute.
This was made from real beat-by-beat timing, so even though it looks like artwork, it’s actually math. But what makes it interesting to me is how human it still is — those little rises and dips are the sound of real people playing together, not a computer or a click track.
