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Movements, Timing, and Precision of Drummers

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Handbook of Human Motion

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Abstract

Percussion instruments vary a great deal in material properties and characteristics of the interaction. Most drums, however, produce sounds with well-defined onsets, and contact time between player and instrument can be very brief. Players of percussion need to have precise control of timing and striking force for sometimes very rapidly repeating, fast movement patterns. This chapter starts by outlining what is specific for drumming movements and how they can be measured. Some general movement strategies used in drumming movements are described and also how tempo, dynamic level, and the surface struck affect the player-instrument interaction and timing control. Lastly, full-body motion capture data from a drum set performance is used to illustrate some of the points addressed in the chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Drums can also be idiophones, such as slit or steel drums, where a more solid structure is set into vibration, and in some drums also, an air column is set to vibrate (e.g., udo clay drums or goblet drums where part of the drum is a Helmholtz resonator).

  2. 2.

    World-renown solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie allegedly travels with 1–2 t of equipment.

  3. 3.

    Although hand drumming interactions have occasionally been measured in other fields (e.g., Jones et al. 2007; Tindale et al. 2005)

  4. 4.

    Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a protocol and standard to communicate between different devices and software programs.

  5. 5.

    Another option is to alternate; samba surdo players use one hand and a mallet in the other hand.

  6. 6.

    The type of grip used naturally varies with beater and instrument. For instance, a common way to hold the double-headed beater often used in bodhrán playing more resembles holding a pencil, and a rotational movement allows both ends to strike the vertically held drumhead.

  7. 7.

    See http://www.extremesportdrumming.com/wfdchampions.htm.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Marcus Lewin for his patience and professional playing and allowing me to use the pictures and data for several of the figures in this chapter and also to Minho Song and Diana Kayser at fourMs, University of Oslo, for assisting with the recordings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sofia Dahl

Authors
  1. Sofia Dahl
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Correspondence to Sofia Dahl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Motion & More, Barcelona, Spain

    Bertram Müller

  2. Klinik für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgi, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Sebastian I. Wolf

  3. Institut for Biomechanics und Orthopedic, German Sport University Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Gert-Peter Brueggemann

  4. Houston, Texas, USA

    Zhigang Deng

  5. ACRISP, FedUniversity, Cremorne, New South Wales, Australia

    Andrew McIntosh

  6. Wilmington, Delaware, USA

    Freeman Miller

  7. Research, C-Motion, Inc., Germantown, Maryland, USA

    William Scott Selbie

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Dahl, S. (2016). Movements, Timing, and Precision of Drummers. In: Müller, B., et al. Handbook of Human Motion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30808-1_110-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30808-1_110-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30808-1

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