Drum Loops Research Articles

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Musical Rhythms Affect Heart Rate Variability: Algorithm and Models

There were a lot of psychological music experiments and models but there were few psychological rhythm experiments and models. There were a lot of physiological music experiments but there were few physiological music models. There were few physiological rhythm experiments but there was no physiological rhythm model. We proposed a physiological rhythm model to fill this gap. Twenty-two participants, 4 drum loops as stimuli, and electrocardiogram (ECG) were employed in this work. We designed an algorithm to map tempo, complexity, and energy into two heart rate variability (HRV) measures, the standard deviation of normal-to-normal heartbeats (SDNN) and the ratio of low- and high-frequency powers (LF/HF); these two measures form the physiological valence/arousal plane. There were four major findings. Initially, simple and loud rhythms enhanced arousal. Secondly, the removal of fast and loud rhythms decreased arousal. Thirdly, fast rhythms increased valence. Finally, the removal of fast and quiet rhythms increased valence. Our work extended the psychological model to the physiological model and deepened the musical model into the rhythmic model. Moreover, this model could be the rules of automatic music generating systems.

Introduction to the special issue on jazz improvisation.

How do we define expert improvisers? What is the nature of their internal dialogue and external interaction during performance? How do we evaluate interaction between musicians during performance? Are certain domain-general abilities related to improvisation achievement? And, can a computer program model the improvisational process? These are some of the questions explored in this special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain (PMMB) based on selected papers from the Improvising Brain Symposium held at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, April 7-9, 2013. The opening event consisted of a concert performed by jazz musicians and related interview in which the featured jazz violinist and the accompanying rhythm section players were asked about their thinking as they listened to short excerpts played back from the just completed performance. In this introduction, I briefly describe interview data from this event as a way to introduce selected articles that make up the core of this special issue. A separate conference report by Steven Anderson describes some of the other papers presented at the symposium.The interview event was conceived as a way to explore interaction between jazz musicians during small group performance. Previous research has outlined the primary importance of this interaction (Berliner, 1994; Monson, 1996; Sawyer, 2006; Vuust & Roepstorff, 2008). Monson interviewed expert jazz musicians looking at a full transcription of a piano trio performance. They described how intimate knowledge of the style allowed them to signal to each other using various techniques including obscure musical references. However, the interview was conducted long after the actual performance took place.The current event was based on a methodology I used in previous research with individual jazz performers (Norgaard, 2011). During each session, I first asked the improviser to perform a blues improvisation along with a recorded drum loop. I then converted their performance to approximate notation that I displayed while playing the original audio in synchrony. This served as the basis for a directed interview in which the performer described his thinking. This design specifically eliminated any external cues, as the performances were recorded in a solo setting. Though the results included important descriptions of the thinking of artist-level improvisers, obviously information about interaction with other players and audience could not be collected.The Improvising Brain concert event offered an opportunity to investigate the thinking of artist-level jazz musicians in an ecologically valid concert environment. Though the participants were aware that the performance would serve as the basis for a subsequent interview, here they played in a group setting in front of an audience of about 300 people in a small concert hall. As in my previous study, an attempt was made to create approximate notation for the violin, piano, and bass parts. However, the technology did not cooperate and most of the interview was based on audio prompts only.The methodology was as follows. The four musicians were asked to play an improvisation on a selected blues theme. They chose the blues composition, Sonnymoon for Two, by jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. The drummer was given a click track set to metronome 200 in a pair of headphones but was asked to take the headphones off as soon as the performance started. The tempo was therefore not necessarily constant. The performance was recorded on four separate tracks representing the four instruments violin, piano, bass, and drums into a computer using standard multitrack recording software (Logic Pro, 2012). The first three were recorded using a direct line signal instead of individual microphones to eliminate cross talk. The drums were recorded with two overhead microphones.After the performance, the musicians were seated in a row on one side of the stage and interviewers on the other about 10 feet away. …

“Copyrights must amend”

Despite outward claims to the contrary, copyright law does not protect artists in the music industry. Two examples present how this is the case: Multi-billion dollar corporations are often at fault in copyright lawsuits that the musicians and artists cannot afford. In these instances, those exploiting the artistic creation of others are at an even greater advantage: copyrights law states that the artist is responsible for discovering instances of stolen work. This means the lawsuit never happens, most artists cannot afford the expenses associated with a lawsuit, and they receive no payment and no credit. Artists need more protection than an invisible shield, especially those whose very arts form assume copyright laws to be obsolete, like musicians creating live sample-based music. The plateau the genre has presently reached exemplifies why copyrights must end, or at least be amended.A proper understanding of this issue requires familiarity with the 'amen break,' which is a sample taken from a drum solo section of the song Brother, recorded by The Winstons in 1969. The drum loop has been used in countless songs since then. Nate Harrison tells an important fact in this story: that the Brother song is a near copy of a Curtis Mayfield song, yet nothing has been done about that. It was a violation of copyright in 1969 and curiously again in the 1990s by ZeroG, a company that sells sample CD kits that contain the Amen loop.Musical sampling as an art form has grown due to changes in technology and the evolution of culture. Art in many forms is not promoted in school anymore. A generation of copy-and-paste artists is the result, and many of us enjoy their creations. Some samplists copy others, but many truly edit and program sample-based songs for a considerable time, sometimes longer than the record company that owns the copyright had spent on the original source material that is being sampled. What samplists do is mix sounds and find out what notes will work well on top of the music they sample. Some of them use their own instruments to play along with clips of funk recordings from the past.Copyrights extinguish the sustainability of this kind of creativity because the nature of the neo-arts draws upon so much common material, which technically the law makes unavailable unless the sampling artist can pay exorbitant licensing fees. Humans need to express themselves and feel connected. It has been argued that ideas do not come from the artist, but from somewhere else. The creative process is built upon exponentially through history. The work of one master is observed and enjoyed. Later another creator stands on the shoulders ofthat master and can make a new work out of something old (Bloom, 1 973). This is the nature of sampling- it happens in music, fine art, and literature. Writers call it intertextuality and this argument comes down to the notion that creators cannot own and appropriate an idea, image, order and timing in which particular sounds are reproduced. It is argued that sounds float about in space and come into the proximity of the artist, and then he or she uses them to express something that can be shared with others (Besant, 1941). Hence it cannot and should not be owned. However, artists must be able to live and support themselves financially.Copyrights have served their purpose in that artists can be compensated for the time they spent creating their art, yet the legal framework is restricting creativity. And it has become very clear that people like creative expression, so I would suggest that a tax for art is the best alternative to the inspiration-restrictive copyright. The tax would fund a Creative Arts Factory. Then if people want to take others' songs and make new ones, they can. If a company wants to use someone else's art to make money, they can. Companies would pay a tax to have the right to use it.There are different solutions based on the circumstances, and in the current political climate an artistic creation tax would likely be voted down. …

Amen to That

Amen to That

Automatic Rhythm Modification of Drum Loops

We propose a novel system able to modify the rhythm of a given drum loop, known as the original, to match the rhythmic pattern of a second loop, known as the model. Our approach is fully automated, thus eliminating the need for MIDI sequencing. The presented methodology combines standard and state-of-the-art techniques for the segmentation and classification of drum sounds, the matching of drum sequences, and the transformation of the original loop. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approach and provide links to examples for the qualitative evaluation of the system's output

Good Copy, Bad Copy

Good Copy, Bad Copy

Drum Loops Retrieval from Spoken Queries

Recent efforts in audio indexing and music information retrieval mostly focus on melody. If this is appropriate for polyphonic music signals, specific approaches are needed for systems dealing with percussive audio signals such as those produced by drums, tabla or djembe. In this article, we present a complete system allowing the management of a drum patterns (or drumloops) database. Queries in this database are formulated with spoken onomatopoeias-short meaningless words imitating the different sounds of the drumkit. The transcription task necessary to index the database is performed using Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) and achieves a 86.4% correct recognition rate. The syllables of spoken queries are recognized and a relevant statistical model allows the comparison and alignment of the query with the rythmic sequences stored in the database, in order to provide a set of the most relevant drum loops.