Heavy or not ? Analysing drum placements in hard rock music

The aim of this study is to verify—thanks to computer musical analysis—if downbeats and backbeats placements are different when a drummer plays in a hard rock or in a funk style. In other words, does beat placements contribute to the heaviness of hard rock? In the field of popular music, many authors admit that there are three ways of placing the bass drum and snare drum beats with respect to metronomic time: either an anticipation, a perfect coincidence, or a slight delay. While the repertoires where the notes coincide with the metronomic time are often described as mechanical and a little cold, the anticipated notes would have a more propitious character to the dance and the delayed notes, would produce a music with a heavy character. These impressions were very often mentioned by those working on heavy metal (Waltzer, Brennan), but they have not been scientifically proven to the extent that these variations are counted in milliseconds. Two new IRCAM software, Audiosculpt and OpenMusic, now make it possible to measure very precisely these smallest variations.

Thanks to this software, I will analyze the snare and bass drum hits in a few funk and hard rock songs released in 1970: James Brown's Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine and Super Bad (with "Jabo" Starks on drums) (which were already analyzed in Danielsen’s Presence and Pleasure, 2006). These songs will be compared with Black Night by Deep Purple (Ian Paice on drums), Uriah Heep's Gypsy (Alex Napier on drums) and Led Zepplin's Immigrant Song (John Bonham on drums). With this small sample, I will of course not be able to draw conclusions for hard rock as a whole, but if differences appear, it will be necessary to work on metadata to know if delaying the beats is a representative practice or simply a clean playing style for some drummers.