Insights into the Nature of Drum Machine Sounds
Date
2017-04-10
Authors
Shier, Jordie
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Abstract
Since the early 1970s programmable drum machines have been used extensively in the creation and performance of popular music. Recordings of individual drum sounds from these drum machines are widely available online and the use of such audio is common practice in music production. This work seeks to shed light on the sonic qualities of drum machine sounds using a sample set of 2026 kick and 2204 snare drums representing over 200 different drum machines. A set of audio feature extraction algorithms from the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is used to create a feature vector describing each sample. The primary components of variation found are Spectral Centroid and Loudness for both kick and snare drums. This is introductory work in the analysis of drum machine samples and the results may prove useful for future work in the field of Intelligent Music Production (IMP) as well as in the development of music production pedagogical methods.
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Keywords
drum machine, music production, computer science, music information retrieval, intelligent music production