As you head out to a rockin’ party tonight, you may encounter evidence of a trend in music performance that is sweeping the world: speed. By which I mean a very high number of beats per minute, or more precisely, foot-drumming speeds north of 200 beats per minute and hand-drumming speeds greater than 1,000 bpm. That’s getting close to the speed at which a hummingbird beats its wings (about 40 cycles per second, 2,400 per minute).
Ever since heavy metal took a turn away from rock in the 1970s, the music, especially the bass drum part, which is vital to the genre, has gotten faster and faster. It’s to the point now where human drummers can’t actually play the drum parts on many songs because of the physical limitations of being human rather than bionic, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In fact, some bands don’t even rehearse anymore, needing simply to program the drum machine to play the part consistently every time. And because many heavy metal purists hold virtuosity in high regard, they even program mistakes that are covered up into the computer-synthesizer so that the music seems as if real human drummers are performing.
Mark Mynett, a British music producer and lecturer at the University of Huddersfield’s Department of Engineering and Technology near Manchester, England, says he once “produced a whole album where the drummer didn’t play a single bass-drum track on a single song.” He likens it to “magazines airbrushing models.”
But other musicians don’t feel the same way about the computerized music generation and the drumming race. For example, the drummer of Norway’s Darkthrone says bands that use computers inappropriately are losers. “Anything that makes a bass drum sound less bass-y is ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying.
We ask the question of our readers: Is it music if humans can’t play it?
