So, DRUMS.

Wherever there’s popular music, they’re not far away. And not just any drums, the drum kit. Kick, snare, toms, cymbals, hats. Sure, there’s lots of variations on the theme, but when you think about the many possible configurations of percussion, isn’t it odd that the basic idea of the drum kit has remained unchanged for so long?

I really love drum kits, and I don’t know why. Such an arbitrary arrangement of sounds and fairly homogenous ways of using those sounds (i.e. keep time on hats, backbeat with the snare, etc.), smacks of stagnance, and yet, I can’t get enough of the drum kit. Why? In a parallel universe, popular music of the 20th century could just as easily been pervaded by a drum kit where the bass drum is hit with a stick and the snare is triggered with a foot pedal. Or perhaps 2 gongs, a djembe and a cowbell. Even though in electronic music there is the opportunity to re-invent the percussion palette, most drum machines still stick to something resembling a kick, something resembling a snare, etc.

So why do I love it so much? I’ve tried to deny it, but I just do. Drum kits are great.

I was reading in Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music the assertion that once we percieve a pulse and meter in a sequence of sounds, we lock onto it. Once we’ve zeroed in on a sense of meter, we hold onto it until strong evidence is heard that suggests another meter or pulse. Syncopation occurs when a rhythm deviates from the felt meter, but not strongly enough to change our basic sense of it.

To give a basic example of this, imagine a stock standard dance beat which centres around a kick drum on all 4 crotchets and a hihat on every second quaver. The classic “unts unts unts” beat. In the breakdown, the kick drops out and we are left with just the hihat on the offbeats. If this goes on for long enough, our brains will unconsciously abandon the original pulse and start percieving the hihats as the onbeat crotchets (listen to the example below).

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F16364305Demo2-offbeat by Chrisperren

(I just realised this example may not work for people who’ve listened to a lot of dance music, as the hi-hat may be a learned cue in itself indicating the off-beat)

This seems like a pretty solid description of rhythm perception. It gets interesting when you think about what might constitute “evidence” of another meter. There’s the obvious cases like the one listed above, where a syncopation becomes so much more salient than the beat-keeping rhythm that it pushes us over the edge into another perception of the beat. But I think sometimes it’s more subtle than that - sometimes it might be more of a learned “cue” within a particular musical idiom. Something that says to your brain “whatever all the other instruments are doing, you need to percieve the beat like this”

For Western pop music, I think the drum kit has become that cue. In keeping with Neisser’s schema theory, what we have heard time & time again has shaped how we interpret incoming signals. So, no matter what kinda crazy ambiguous rhythms you might be hearing from other instruments, if you get a “one” on the kick and a backbeat on the snare, that’s your beat. Once those elements are there, you’re locked into that meter and it’ll take a lot to push you out of it. Try and imagine a drum kit playing the kick on 2 and 4, and the snare on 1 and 3. In fact listen to the example of this pattern below - even with my courtesy 4 beat count-in, I bet you can’t hear it as snare on 1 & 3 and kick on 2 & 4. It’s very difficult to do, because we are so thoroughly conditioned to interpret it in one way, and one way only. The drum kit has POWER.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F16364130Demo1-backbeat by Chrisperren

Maybe this is why the drum kit is so appealing to me. When drummers play with time signatures and mess around with the placement of hits, pushing the boundaries of the stock-standard rock beat, the effect is not just one of interesting syncopation. It’s also playfully screwing with your conditioned expectations of what those sounds should do and what their function in the music is.

They also have the power to impose a pulse or meter on a piece of music that is radically different to what you would have perceived without the drums there. In the case of metric modulation, the drums make the job so much easier, because when they change, everything changes.

In the example below, from a Mr. Maps track, when Jac hits the 6/4 beat at 1:25, we have to abandon our original perception of the beat and take on the new one, even though none of the other instruments change what they are doing.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F8099979Mr. Maps - Step Step by lofly recordings

My argument is that because of all this conditioning, this effect wouldn’t be as strong with any other random set of percussion sounds. It works because it’s a kick, snare, hats, and a crash, and these particular sounds have a unique position of power in our musical perceptual schema. At least for listeners raised on western pop & rock music.

I imagine that in other musical idioms there are other musical devices or sounds that act as learned cues for meter. Especially in the rhythmically complex music of India and South East Europe, you would imagine there would be very strong learned cues to assist experienced listeners in finding the beat and locking onto it. This also means that for listeners unfamiliar to the style, it will sound like a continuous rhythmic mess without any strong definition or cycle. I guess this also explains why I have so much trouble finding the “one” in some latin music - I haven’t listened to enough of it and I haven’t learned the cues.

So the drum kit, in its traditional, arbitrary configuration, holds a pride of place in our conditioned perceptual systems. They are like the master of ceremonies of the rhythm show, we look to them to know what’s going on when. I think good drummers must understand this in an intuitive way, because it is the playful fake-outs and rhythmic tangents, combined with just enough affirmation of the actual underlying beat, that makes exciting drumming.

Drums = Win.