A Stimulus Set of 40 Popular Music Drum Patterns with Perceived Complexity Measures

Abstract

This study presents an audio stimulus set of 40 drum patterns from Western popular music with empirical measurements of perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness information, and highly precise onset timing measurements. The 40 stimuli are a subset selected from a previously published larger corpus of reconstructed Western popular music drum patterns (Lucerne Groove Research Library). The patterns were selected according to two criteria: a) they only feature the bass drum, snare drum, and one or more cymbals, and b) they plausibly cover the complexity range of the corpus. Perceived stimulus complexity was measured in a listening experiment using a pairwise comparison design with 220 participants (4,400 trials). In each trial, participants were presented with two stimuli, and they stated which of the two sounded more complex to them. The comparison data then served to calculate complexity estimates using the Bradley–Terry probability model. The complexity estimates have an intuitive interpretation: they allow calculation of the probability that one pattern is considered more complex than another pattern in a pairwise comparison. To our knowledge, this is the first set of naturalistic music stimuli with meaningful perceived complexity estimates. The drum pattern stimuli and complexity measurements can be used for listening experiments in music psychology. The stimuli will further allow measures and models of drum pattern complexity to be assessed.

Predictive coding in musical anhedonia: A study of groove

“…Part of this difference, i.e. higher pleasure ratings than move ratings, may reflect our choice of stimuli: the present stimulus set is newly published and validated by perceived complexity ([ 23 ] as derived from [ 47 ]); thus fewer research groups have used them. The present stimuli are all audio reconstructions of expert transcriptions of 8-bar extracts of original recordings by expert drummers, whereas stimuli from previous studies are not derived from originally recorded popular music, but were composed by the researchers to show extreme (high or low) levels of syncopation.…”

“…Perceived complexity offers a theoretically motivated and empirically validated continuum of complexity measures, while being relatively naturalistic and ecologically valid [ 23 ]. Due to time constraints for participants in the present study, we chose to collect ratings from a subset of 15 stimuli curated from the database of 40 drumbeat stimuli, representing the high, medium, and low categories of a fuller continuum of perceived complexity.…”

“…Following this, participants were redirected to Qualtrics to complete the main task being reported in this manuscript Participants were exposed to the fifteen drum excerpts selected from the Senn et al (2023) corpus [ 23 ]. Each stimulus was presented in a randomized order across participants.…”

“…Measures of rhythmic complexity. To manipulate the rhythmic complexity of musical excerpts, we drew our stimuli from a newly-released corpus of 40 drum pattern excerpts from Western popular music that are normed for perceived complexity [23]. While rhythmic complexity has been operationalized using syncopation [5], listeners' judgments of complexity (i.e., perceived complexity, Senn et al, 2023), and computationally-derived measurements of complexity (i.e., estimated complexity, [24]), we opted to use perceived complexity in the present study.…”

Null effect of perceived drum pattern complexity on the experience of groove

“…The index of syncopation is a heuristic method, and its suitability for measuring complexity was only recently established: Senn et al (2023a) carried out a listening experiment, in which they empirically measured the perceived complexity of 40 popular music drum patterns (different from Witek et al's) using a paired-comparisons approach. The index of syncopation showed a medium to strong positive correlation with perceived complexity (𝑟 = .701, 𝑅 !…”