Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics in a Virtuoso Drum Track | Hacker News Reader

Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics in a Virtuoso Drum Track

journals.plos.org

31 pointscfadvan12 comments

Here's the song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY0--b6DLqQ

I can't resist also posting a link to the Ventures playing Telstar in 1962, with the drummer playing 16th notes on the high-hat almost throughout, at (by my wristwatch) about 144 1/4 notes per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6DmtPQv7V8 -- This must have been done with two hands.

Thanks. I clicked on the youtube link before reading the article and was surprised at first that the paper was about Warren G (as some geek off the street, I had never heard of Michael McDonald).

TL;DR: "Here we use highly sensitive onset detection and time series analysis to study the amplitude and temporal fluctuations of Jeff Porcaro’s one-handed hi-hat pattern in “I Keep Forgettin’”—one of the most renowned 16th note patterns in modern drumming."

I'd like to see scientific analyses of Peart and Gadd pieces as well. I'm still not convinced that all of what Peart does is technically possible.

The tools for analyzing already recorded music is extremely accessible today; especially if you can find stems for the tracks you're interested in (any songs that have appeared in Rock Band or Guitar Hero have stems available if you dig a little or extract them yourself...pretty sure Rush songs have appeared in those games, and certainly something Gadd has appeared on has as well).

You could do that analysis.

Session players often seem superhuman because they've really deeply studied so many styles and genres. They're like world class athletes, in that their lives revolve around playing their instrument flawlessly and with minimal rehearsal time. Some of these famous tracks were done in just a couple of takes, and the session players might play on dozens of tracks for multiple artists in a week. Most rock bands would kill for that kind of efficiency. (And, I'd bet there are session players that'd be able to replicate Peart's style reasonable effectively.)

The documentary "Steely Dan : The Making of Aja" (available on YouTube[0]; some assembly required) has fascinating segments on how the performances were assembled.

Quoting from the Wikipedia page on the title cut[1]:

"According to (Historian) Sweet, Gadd's playing was so visually appealing to watch that some of the other players became distracted and had to rerecord portions of their parts later."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steely+dan+aja+... (also has one of Gadd explaining/demonstrating his performance)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja_(song)

Steely Dan records, Aja in particular, are what happens when you get the best session players in the world in a studio with a huge budget and guided by a couple of guys whose egos didn't get in the way. They often let the players play whatever they felt was right for the song. They understood that when you've got somebody of the caliber of Purdie at the drums, you don't really need to tell him what to play, you just get out of the way. I've always really appreciated the quality of the recording of Aja, but as an adult I've grown to love the music, too.

And, yeah, I also recommend that documentary. Several of the Classic Albums series are really good. Dark Side of the Moon and Rumours come to mind. They also happen to be studio masterpieces, often listed alongside Aja as being pinnacles of recording quality. (Interesting how they're all from the same era. That sort of big album industry was a fleeting thing.)

"And, I'd bet there are session players that'd be able to replicate Peart's style reasonable effectively"

Replicating Peart's style is hard but not impossible, though many drummers (even great ones such as Mike Portnoy) often get it wrong because they look for speed and perfect timing while the strongest point of Peart has always been his sense of dynamics: he could make a song by hitting only a single drum just by modulating strength of the hits, their speed and time changes.

Jazz musicians are picky about rock drummers invading their lawn (for very good reasons I'd say), but I think Peart made it pretty well. Check this one at the Buddy Rich Memorial Concerts and don't miss the solo, this sounds like a variation of the old solo in the Exit Stage Left live album) I like this one a lot more than the newer ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0gYHLkY4qA

To me his very distinctive traits also are his use of upbeats (in fills too) and that famous ride pattern which totally raises attention among Rush fans as soon as you start playing it. These guys nail it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhTmDSrNvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYaVZojowiQ

> Peart

Prof. Moriarty of Sixty Symbols discussed[1] this paper, where he was particularly interested in extending the research into other drummers and music styles. For a while, he was asking[2] people to submit covers of the drum track for Tom Sawer for analysis.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyLeBMdI_HU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGH6-BcKCME

Can anyone translate this into plain English please? I have played the drums, and I still don't get it. I get that they are measuring the spacing and loudness of his drumming, specifically how he hits the hi-hat instrument. As expected with any human player, there are fluctuations. He speeds up and slows down. He hits harder or softer.

It sounds like they have found a pattern, and that's the part I don't get. These phrases seem central:

1. long-range correlated (LRC) fluctuations

2. detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA)

Yet I can't figure out what these mean, even after reading about them in Wikipedia too.

I can guess what 1. means:

The hits are not exactly on time (fluctuating), but they are not randomly off either.

If you observe a few hits you can guess something statistically about the next hits (correlated).

These possible guesses span more than just 2-3 hits (long-range).

I think they just observed timing. Not much novel insight, but they also made the hi-hat detection from a full-band recording automatic and hope this aids further research. The known insight is, that there are non-trivial, not yet understood patterns in the timing and it's proven that people prefer music that has these patterns. It seems that what feels right is neither something mechanically on point, nor something slightly off in a random fashion, nor just patterns within 2-3 neighboring hits, but something more sophisticated.

What is really promising what they hint at at the end: Feeding these patterns in to drum computers. There are already "grove" patterns for an off timing, but they probably don't feel perfectly natural because they still lack these hidden patterns.

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About 2.: I'm really not sure, but I'd guess detrending would mean to calculate away things like an accelerando and only observe the pseudo random, minuscule changes in timing. An accelerando would allow for the easy guess that the next hits will come even faster, but this insight would be trivial. You want to exclude these trends from the calculations.

"Published: June 3, 2015", so should have a [2015] in the submission title.

And here's a related paper on complex synchronisation in music performances from 2014 [1], which led to the development of a Max patch to put the human sync feel back into electronic music performances [2].

"Based on research from Harvard scientists, Holden has built a Max for Live device which automatically shapes the timing of your audio and MIDI channels, injecting the organic push-pull feel you can only get from human performance." [3]

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/36/12974

[2] http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/2466/group-humanize...

[3] https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/james-holden-human-timing/

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