Jason Hockman
Birmingham City University
Give the Drummer Some More: Advances in Breakbeat Analysis/Synthesis
In the late 1980s, popular electronic music emerged at the critical intersection between affordable computer technology and the consumer market, and has since grown to become the one of the most popular genres in the world. Ubiquitous within electronic music creation, digital sampling has facilitated the incorporation of professional-quality recorded performances into productions; one of the most frequently sampled types of recordings used in these genres are short percussion solos from funk and jazz performances—or breakbeats. While these samples add an essential energetic edge to productions, they are generally used without consent or recognition. Thus, there is an urgency for the ethical redistribution of cultural value to account for the influence of a previous generation of artists. This presentation will present an overview on the topic of breakbeats and their relation to modern music genres as well as current approaches for breakbeat analysis, synthesis and transformative effects developed in the SoMA Group at Birmingham City University.
References
- A review of automatic drum transcription Chih-Wei Wu, Christian Dittmar, Carl Southall, Richard Vogl, Gerhard Widmer, Jason Hockman, Meinard Müller, Alexander Lerch; IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 2018
- One in the Jungle: Downbeat Detection in Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum and Bass Jason Hockman, Matthew EP Davies, Ichiro Fujinaga; ISMIR 2012
- Drum synthesis and rhythmic transformation with adversarial autoencoders Maciej Tomczak, Masataka Goto, Jason Hockman; Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2020
- Adversarial synthesis of drum sounds Jake Drysdale, Maciej Tomczak, Jason Hockmanl; Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx2020) 2020
- Computational strategies for breakbeat classification and resequencing in hardcore, jungle and drum and bass Jason A Hockman, Matthew Davies; 2015
Jason Hockman is an Associate Professor of Audio Engineering at Birmingham City University (United Kingdom), where he leads the Sound and Music Analysis Group in computational analysis and generation of sound and music. Jason is a music information retrieval researcher, a professional music producer and performer, and an owner of an award-winning independent record label. His interests have led him to conduct research related to a diverse set of topics, including music transcription, digital musicology, rhythm and metre analysis, neural audio synthesis, best practices for recording and archival, and interactive and performance music systems.