Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Ralf von Appen & David Carter
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Doctoral Colloquium: Ralf von Appen, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, & David Carter, Loyola Marymount University
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Title: A Different Drummer: The Rise of Metronomic Regularity in Popular Music, 1965-2020
Abstract:
Drummers have ostensibly been threatened with extinction since drum machines and click tracks made their way into mainstream popular music in the 1970s. These implements became commonly-used tools in the 1980s and 90s, until by the mid-90s it was much more common for pop hits to use a drum machine or sampler rather than a live drummer. Drum programming moved “into the box” around the turn of the century, reducing the amount of hardware but also further reducing human players’ role. In recent years, innovations in AI as well as the pandemic have exacerbated the challenges facing professional drummers. The prevalence of drum sequencing in today’s studio recordings has put drummers at risk of becoming cosmetic accessories in live performance, miming playing while contributing little to the audible result.
In order to precisely trace the rise of the technologically-based metronomic regularity that has profoundly challenged the profession and changed the aesthetics of popular music, we undertook a corpus study of hits from the 1960s to today. Our research uses software like Sonic Visualiser, Logic, and Melodyne to examine tempo variability and microtiming in 120 songs in the Billboard year-end pop charts. We complement this survey with systematic examination of drummer credits in chart-topping songs over time and in statistics reflecting the decreasing numbers of drummers and drum kits sold. Interviews we have conducted with professional drummers provide further perspective on the changes to the profession and on the economic, social, and creative challenges facing these musicians.
We show how objectively measuring the amount of tempo steadiness of the top 10 songs from each year of the year-end Billboard charts reveals the gradual shift from the late 1960s to today towards metronomic regularity in popular music, with the songs that defy this trend tending to be throwbacks in other respects as well. Study of microtiming in songs shows how the common microtiming irregularities of early 1970s drumming gradually became less common, with attacks occurring more and more precisely on the beat. Our findings delineate the changed musical environment in which drummers have found themselves in recent decades.
Biographies:
Ralf von Appen is Professor for Theory and History of Popular Music at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria. He has published widely about the history, psychology, aesthetics and analysis of popular music and has co-edited the collection Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music with Allan Moore, André Doehring and Dietrich Helms. Ralf was chair of the German Society for Popular Music Studies from 2008-2020 and is editor of the German book series Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung.
David S. Carter is a music theorist and composer based in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of Music at Loyola Marymount University. He earned his doctorate in music composition at Northwestern University and J.D. at the University of Southern California. He has published popular music analysis in Music Theory Online and has presented papers at the Society for Music Theory annual meeting as well as at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music international and U.S. conferences. As a composer, he won the Iron Composer competition at Baldwin Wallace University, Northwestern University’s William T. Faricy Award, and second prize in the Rhenen International Carillon Composition Competition. Examples of his compositional work can be found at davidcartercomposer.com and soundcloud.com/davidscarter.