◆◆◆

Rhythm Notes
◆ Construction, Practice, Performance ◆
Polyrhythms
◆◆◆

William L. Benzon
March 2002 to Fall 2003
Published on October 29, 2018

◆◆◆
 Polyrhythms
Construction, Practice, Performance
◆ Rhythm Notes ◆
by

William L. Benzon

ABSTRACT: A series of notes about learning to play patterns, especially

polyrhythms on a tongue drum with six tongues. 2 against 3, 3 against, 4, different
stroking patterns, early learning and then phase changes when moving from slow
to fast tempos, when moving from learning to consolidation and then
performance. Becoming fluid at switching between different fixed patterns on to
free improvisation, where you play any pattern you are capable of playing in
whatever order you choose. Conscious and deliberate effort vs. automatic,
unconscious and spontaneous play. The layout of musical ‘space’ for different
instruments: drums, trumpet, piano, strings.

CONTENTS

What’s Up? I’ve always been a tapper ............................................................................................................. 2

Learning Polyrhythms........................................................................................................................................... 5
Free-Drumming and Visual-Motor Space ........................................................................................................ 9
Musical Space ....................................................................................................................................................... 13
Recruitment ......................................................................................................................................................... 13
Divisions of the Motor System ........................................................................................................................ 14
Repetition & the Inner Other .......................................................................................................................... 14
Timing and Pattern Stability .............................................................................................................................. 15
Streaming .............................................................................................................................................................. 20
Free Drumming, etc. .......................................................................................................................................... 21
Adding Electronic Drum to the Repertoire ................................................................................................. 22

wlb
1301 Washington St., No. 311
Hoboken, NJ 07030
917.717.9841
bbenzon@mindspring.com

Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2017 by William L. Benzon. All Rights Reserved

–1–
WHAT’S UP? I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A TAPPER

I’ve always been a tapper, my toes, my fingers on the table, whatever. We are, after all, rhythm
machines. But when it came time to learn a musical instrument I choose trumpet and then, a few
years later, piano. When I was living in Baltimore and going to Johns Hopkins I bought some used
conga drums at Ted’s Music in Baltimore, a wonderful place, by the way, and still in business and
taught myself how to get some decent sounds out of them. I even performed on them in public,
on a few occasions.

When I moved to Troy, NY, I’d go to the Newport Festival, I believe it was, in Saratoga Springs.
And one summer, most likely in the early 1980s, I bought this tongue drum:

A single glance tells you why it’s called a tongue drum, you play those wooden tongues. The
different tongues give you different quasi-pitches. I say “quasi” because none of them have a well
defined pitch center, but the tongues are clearly high or low in proportion to their length. The
last time I went into a drum store (in New York City) to get another tongue drum I discovered
that they’re all tuned to a pentatonic scale, which is OK if you’re looking for a melodic
instrument, which I wasn’t. I prefer the less precisely tuned drum.

Some of the tongues are more responsive than others, so you have to do a bit of exploring to
find the “sweet spot” for each tongue. And then you have to be sure to hit that spot each time
you hit the tongue, unless, of course, you want a deader sound. Which is to say that you don’t
just bang on the drum. You have to learn to work with it, learn how best it speaks. There are
subtleties.

–2–
Always, there are subtleties.

That’s what these notes are about, not necessarily the subtleties, though sometimes, but about
learning to play these drums, and bells as well (such as those on the cover page). Though I’d been
tapping on them on and off ever since I’d bought them it wasn’t until early in this century (and
millennium too) that I started systematically practicing them. By that time I’d been corresponding
with the late Walter Freeman, the Berkeley neurobiologist, about the brain and music, so I started
corresponding with him about learning to play these drums. Most, though not all, of the notes I’ve
gathered here come from that correspondence, much of which was directed to Ralph Holloway
as well. Holloway is a physical anthropologist at Columbia who is interested in the brains of early
humans and pre-human hominins; he’s also a trumpet player.

Learning Polyrhythms: To Walter Freeman: Playing drag triplets when young (three notes
strung over a pair of toe taps). 30 years later, two against three, where I began playing bells,
occasional balaphone, and the tongue drum; 2 against 3, 3 against 2 finally clicked and consolidated
within a day or two. Then I went on to 3 against 4, somewhat harder (still not solid, though I’ve
not tried in awhile). And then there’s some comments on breathlessness while playing the
trumpet. I’ve written a set of variations on Thelonius Monk’s “Epistrophy”, where the first and
third movements involve a bit of polyrhythmic trickery. When playing those I find myself getting
out of breath more rapidly than is consistent with the physical difficulty involved. I speculate: “I’m
guessing that the rhythmic complexity of the music brings about a different entrainment with
physiology and that’s what’s making me breathless.”

Free-Drumming and Visual-Motor Space: To Walter Freeman and Ralph Holloway: “I

noticed something interesting the other day that has to do with “free drumming” (to be defined).
I seemed to be making choices in visual-motor space rather than auditory space. This is quite
different from what I do when improvising on the trumpet, where I seem to make choices in
auditory space. That is to say, when playing the trumpet I make choices in terms of what I want
to hear rather than in terms of what I want my body to do. I’m not sure whether or not this is
because I’m considerably more expert on the trumpet than on my drum.” Responses from both
Freemand and Holloway and replies to both.

Musical Space: To myself: A continuation of the previous discussion where I consider the
musical spaces of the piano and stringed instruments.

Recruitment: To myself: The idea is that the “impact,” “effect,” or “meaning,” of later passages
depends on recruitment resulting from the earlier passages.

Divisions of the Motor System: To myself: I suspect that different levels of “psych” involve
differing levels of recruitment of three different types of muscle fibers.

Repetition & the Inner Other: To myself: For the past two or three weeks I’ve noticed a
subtle difference when I play a pattern on the tongue drum and hold it. It feels as though some
“other being” is gently participating in my playing, making things a little steadier.

Timing and Pattern Stability: To Freeman, Freeman replies, and I reply to him: This is
about stroking patterns for playing triplets (say, LRR LRR LRR... vs. LRL RLR LRL ...) alternating
between high and low tones and then switching between stroke patterns. Sounds tricky.
Freeman’s comment: “Yes, it's [Benjamin] Libet's territory, also Scott Kelso and his finger motion,
which is the kind of state transition you describe, only his was much simpler, a shift from in phase

–3–
to anti-phase locking with increasing tempo. He modeled that with Haken's synergetics.” There’s
more (there’s always more).

Streaming: From a note to Sasha Shulgin1: Streaming – the way different notes group
themselves into perceptually different melodic streams – has practical consequences for
musicologists trying to transcribe the different components of West African drum ensembles. It
is all but impossible to figure out who's playing what line simply by listening to the sound and
watching the players. Now, if you're a player in the middle of this . . . what's the subjective effect
of being unable to hear who's doing what?

Free Drumming, etc.: To Freeman and Holloway: About two or three weeks ago I was doing
some free drumming and things began “clicking” in a way they never had before. I was able to
improvise long phrases of some complexity that, all of a sudden, made sense to me. Improvement
since that time has been steady and rapid. The important stuff was simply learning to play
repetitive patterns, lots of them, and to switch smoothly from one pattern to another. In fact, I
would say that the main function of free drumming over the past year was to force some fluidity
into my playing.

Adding Electronic Drum to the Repertoire: To Freeman and Holloway: This is about
what happens when I start playing electronic drums. The playing surface changes, both in
arrangment of surfaces and in the physical property of those surface. I now have a large array of
sounds available to me. And, when I add the kick pedal, I’m now generating three streams of hits,
rather than two. There’s a lot of stuff here. Freeman notes, “somewhat resembles my 4-limb
involvement learning to fly a glider. your intuition of 'deep' structure is right on target. resonates
with my current work on scale-free structure and phase transitions in cerebral cortex.”

1
Alexander Theodore "Sasha" Shulgin, Wikipedia: “... (June 17, 1925 – June 2, 2014) was an
American medicinal chemist, biochemist, organic chemist, pharmacologist, psychopharmacologist,
and author. He is credited with introducing MDMA ("ecstasy" or "molly") to psychologists in the
late 1970s for psychopharmaceutical use and for the discovery, synthesis and personal bioassay of
over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin.

–4–
LEARNING POLYRHYTHMS
3.22.2002

Dear Walter,

I thought I’d offer some informal observations about learning to play polyrhythms. The occasion
for these observations is simple: about a week ago I was finally able to play 3 beats in the left
hand against 4 in the right. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

The Early Years

The early part of the story takes place in my childhood, of which my memories are poor. I
started learning the trumpet in the 4th grade, when I was 10. Somewhere, say within the first
two years, I learned to play eight-note triplets, three (more or less) evenly spaced notes within a
single beat. I then learned to play quarter-note or “drag” triplets, three notes spaced over two
beats. I vaguely remember that as being somewhat more difficult. The problem was that, like lots
of kids, I was taught to beat time with my foot. Eight-note triplets occur within the span of a
single foot tap, while quarter-note triplets span two foot-tapes. That’s the problem, placing three
notes over two foot taps. You are, in effect, playing polyrhythms between the arm-hand-tongue-
breath system of trumpeting and the foot system of time-keeping (which also has a verbal
component). In any event, I somehow learned that. [My impression is that, in general, children
have a more difficult time learning quarter-note triplets than eight-note triplets.]

We move ahead a few years to my early teens when I took piano lessons for about two years (in
addition to continuing on trumpet). Somewhere in that period I encountered playing two in the
left hand against three in the right. I lost.

Two Against Three

We now move ahead about 30 years. I was playing with a group called the New African Music
Collective (NAMC). The group varied from one occasion to the next, but had a core personnel of
me on trumpet (and some percussion), Ade on percussion, and Druis on percussion and vocals.
When we added players to the group, we added percussionists, though we had a bass player for
awhile. The central musical premise of the group was to explore African and Afro-Cuban
rhythms: polyrhythm central. So I got used to floating my trumpet lines over and against
polyrhythm and became proficient at superimposing various groupings on whatever was
happening with the percussionists. Thus I could play lines that would have been four-square and
dull if they had stood alone; but they bristled with tension and force in a polyrhythmic context.

It is in this context that I began to practice playing an small 8-key balaphone (a marimba-like
instrument with gourd resonators) and a tongue drum (a wooden box with eight “tongues” cut
into the top surface). Every so often I’d take a wack at playing 2 against 3 (2-3). One day it just
clicked. And it became reliable fairly quickly, within one or two days. That is to say, I could sit
down at the instrument (whether balaphone or tongue drum) and start playing 2 against 3 without
any preparation.

Initially I played only two tones, one for the left hand and one for the right. However, I quickly
developed the ability to move one hand or the other over some range of keys while the other
hand remained anchored on one key. Then I worked on moving both hands over some range of
keys while still maintaining a steady and consistent 2-3. Given that I am right-handed, it has always
been easier to play two in the left hand against three in the right. Playing three in the left against
two in the right is more difficult, as is switching back and forth between the two regimes, 2/left

–5–
against 3/right, 3/left against 2/right. As I have had no particular interest in becoming really
proficient on these instruments I have never spent a great deal of time practicing 3/left against
2/right. I have no idea how things would change if I were to spend, say, a mere half hour a day for
six months working on that regime.

Now, the thing about 2-3 is that it can easily be parsed into 6. You can’t really count it in six at
faster tempos, but . . . The trick that made 2-3 work for me was simply to hear the two middle
strokes as successive pitches in one single line. Once I could do that I found it easy to do 2-3 at
any tempo and even to accelerate and decelerate at will. When the tempo gets fast enough,
however, those two middle tones no longer “stream” to the same line. Rather the notes break
apart into two lines, one with three notes and the other with two. Actually, when I’m moving
both hands from one tone to another it gets more complicated than that.

During this period I’d attempt 3-4 every now and then, but had little or no success. That brings
us to the present.

Three Against Four

About a week ago I managed to play three in the left hand against four in the right with some
success. By that I mean I could sustain the pattern for 10s of seconds and the playing in each hand
was fairly steady. I’ve been able to repeat the performance each day since then, so it’s not a fluke.

But it’s far from being rock steady. It’s only today that I’ve been able to sit down at the tongue
drum and play three-against-four (3-4) right off, without any preparation. However, it’s not very
steady; it doesn’t feel at all “locked.” And I’m pretty much limited to playing on only one tone
with each hand. The minute I attempt to move one hand or the other back and forth between
two tones the 3-4 coupling breaks down. I assume that will change with practice, though I have
no sense of how much practice will be required.

The most interesting aspect of this process is the fact that I’ve had to work my way into the 3-4
pattern at each playing session. The most successful technique (though not the only one I’ve
tried) is to start by playing a four-beat pattern in the right hand (at a comfortable pace) and
playing the left hand on the first beat of the pattern. Once that is going nice a even — which is
easy to do — I then direct my attention to the left hand and start playing three beats in the
appropriate interval. Sometimes it works and sometimes not. Eventually it works and once it
does, I can keep it up.

You might observe that, after all, one might achieve 3-4 by starting off with three in the left
against two in the right. You then double the number of strokes in the right and you’ve got it. I
haven’t found that to work very well. However, I find that, when playing 3-4, I am beginning to be
able to “hear” 3-2 “within” the overall pattern. I don’t really know what’s going on here, but how
I hear things is crucial.

I also notice that, at times, it seems as though I’m simultaneously counting 3 for the left and 4 for
the right. That is to say, one inner voice is counting “1 2 3 1 2 3 . . . .” while another inner voice
is counting “1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 . . . .” I don’t regard this introspection as terribly reliable, but my
intention seems to be to get those two counts going simultaneously. But I also believe that rock-
steady success requires that I get beyond counting anything with inner voices. Sometimes I’m
counting, sometimes not. I also observe that, when fumbling my way to 3-4 I sometimes slip into
3-6 (which, of course, is easy) and 3-5 (which should not be easy). Once I’ve got 3-4 in better
shape I may go after 3-5.

–6–
Now I want to consider a different aspect of this.

Breathlessness
I’ve spent some time over the last year or so on a single trumpet project, a completely notated
set of variations using the form of Thelonius Monk’s “Epistrophy.” The object of this project is
rhythm. The variations are arranged into three movements where I used different approaches to
rhythm in each movement. Here I’m concerned only with the first and third movements.

This first movement goes through Monk’s form three times (with three additional bars at the end)
and, in effect, uses four different meters, though it isn’t notated that way. It is notated in 2/2 time,
with the melody line written in quarter notes or eight notes as convenient. The quarter note
phrases (mostly in the first chorus) are, in fact, quarter-note triplets and many of the eighth-note
phrases are, in fact, quintuplets or sextuplets. Rather than make the score busy by explicitly
indicating these triplets, etc. (or by changing meters often) I’ve simply written quarter notes and
eight notes. However, one should feel the piece as being in different meters: 3/X, 4/X, 5/X, and
6/X. Each meter lasts for 8 or 16 bars and then we switch to a different meter.

Now, when, say, Stravinsky shifts from one meter to another (say, from 5/16 to 3/16) the
duration of the unit carrying the basic moving pulse stays the same. The sixteenth note in 5/16 is
the same as a sixteenth note in 3/16 but the duration of a single measure changes. What I’m
doing is different. An eighth note in 4/4 is just a bit longer than an eighth note in (what is in
effect) 10/8. The duration of a single measure stays the same, but the pace of notes within the
measure changes. Stravinsky’s trick involves “counting” while mine involves the basic “pulse.”

For some reason that is mysterious, I find my practice to be unexpectedly “exhausting.” I mean,
no, it’s not really exhausting. But I find myself breathing heavily and sweating while playing this
movement. As far as I know nothing I or any other trumpet playing does while playing involves
the kind of energy expenditures that requires perspiration to dissipate heat. Nonetheless
trumpeters (and other musicians) do perspire while playing. It’s not terribly unusual, not for me
or for others and I take it as a sign of emotional arousal, though I’m not aware of anyone having
studied it.

However, it’s unusual for me to perspire while playing something that I can’t quite pull off.
Perspiration normally comes when I’m playing something I know well and am beyond the need to
practice it for the purpose of executing the notes properly. It requires mastery of the material.
That’s not the case with these variations. I haven’t quite got it down. But I can still work up a
sweat.

The same thing happens when I work on the third movement. This movement begins with long
strings of eighth notes that are to be played “fluidly, like congas.” The underlying idea was inspired
by the sound of congas. Imagine two congas one a bit higher than the other. You play a simple
pattern of eighth notes, playing a triple pattern where the first note is playing on one drum and
the second two notes are played on the other drum. This determines the interval pattern of the
eighth-note lines in this movement. However, those lines are superimposed on Monk’s chord
changes, which move by half-notes (e.g. four eighth notes) in the A sections and whole notes in
the bridge. So, for most of the piece what have a three-note triple rhythm being played against a
four-note harmonic rhythm. That tension is what gives this movement its propulsive force. As is
the case with the first movement, practicing this leaves me breathless and sweaty.

In fact, breathlessness is even more likely here than with the first movement. I’ve got plenty of
opportunity to breath while playing, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. It would be interesting

–7–
to monitor my breathing, heart rate, and metabolism while playing these pieces and compare the
readings to those taken when I’m playing pieces which make similar technical demands but don’t
involve the rhythmic complexity. I’m guessing that the rhythmic complexity of the music brings
about a different entrainment with physiology and that’s what’s making me breathless. If that’s the
case, then I think that successful performance of these pieces will require a different pattern of
coupling between the structure of the music and my underlying physiology.

This makes me wonder about the breathing of Indian musicians in the Carnatic tradition, which
involves fierce polyrhythms.

Addendum: Fragility and Recruitment

3.23.2002

What interests me about my current situation with respect to playing 3 against 4 is that the
performance is real, but fragile. Up until a week ago I couldn't do it. But now I can. Something
has changed in my brain, I've learned something, but what?

One possibility is that this knowledge is basically/only perceptual at this point. I can now "hear" 3-
4 in a way that I couldn't before. Once the auditory system detects 3-4 it is able to do something
to help the motor system maintain the performance. But the motor system is incapable of
initiating the performance of 3-4. So, I've got to putter around in this and that way and get my
hands to produce 3-4 in some way. Once they manage to blunder into it the auditory system
picks up on it and then (though some appropriate intermediary) generates signals that help the
motor system time its activities.

Now, yesterday I was able, for the first time, to sit at my drum and start right off playing 3-4. The
motor system seems to have learned the timing. But, that proved fragile. After I played 3-4 for
awhile I went on to practice other things. When I decided, once again, to play 3-4, I could no
longer do so at will. I have to fumble around again until I found it. So, whatever the motor
system "had" at the beginning of the session somehow got obscured by subsequent playing.

It's as though the act of performing this or that pattern recruits neurons to the performance on a
temporary basis. Once I start a decent 3-4 rhythm neurons become recruited to that pattern and
it becomes easy to sustain that pattern. But, if I then go on to play different patterns, neurons will
be recruited to them and the 3-4 contingent becomes too weak to function effectively. Until, that
is, I stumble into the 3-4 pattern again and do some more recruiting.

Later,

Bill B

–8–
FREE-DRUMMING AND VISUAL-MOTOR SPACE
4.6.2002

Walter and Ralph,

I noticed something interesting the other day that has to do with “free drumming” (to be
defined). I seemed to be making choices in visual-motor space rather than auditory space. This is
quite different from what I do when improvising on the trumpet, where I seem to make choices in
auditory space. That is to say, when playing the trumpet I make choices in terms of what I want
to hear rather than in terms of what I want my body to do. I’m not sure whether or not this is
because I’m considerably more expert on the trumpet than on my drum.

Let me begin by describing my drum. It’s what’s called a tongue drum. It’s a wooden box about
24 inches along its greatest dimension (which is oriented horizontally and transverse when
playing) and 8 inches along the other dimensions. It has six “tongues” cut into the top (playing)
surface arranged in three rows with two tongues in each row. The tongues are of different
lengths but are not precisely tuned. While you can, in most cases, easily hear which tongue in any
pair is higher, you cannot assign any particular interval to the pitch difference. I should note,
however, that you can get different sounds from any given tongue depending on where you hit it.
Thus you can hit a long tongue in such a place that the tone will sound higher than that you get
when hitting a shorter tongue. The major point, however, is simply that the tongues are not
precisely tuned and, in consequence, you cannot play melodic lines and riffs. This is a drum, not a
six-toned marimba.

So, the melodic and harmonic imagination I employ when playing the trumpet isn’t very useful
here. Rhythm, of course, remains. But we do need a term for the higher and lower aspect of the
sound. Brain imaging data does suggest that interval perception is different from pitch perception
and that, in turn, suggests that our ordinary sense of melody is really the joint produce of interval
and pitch perception. Thus interval perception by itself tells you whether one tone is more or
less higher or lower than another and gives some sense of the magnitude of the difference. But
the ordinary sense of melody combines that with perception of the pitches of the individual tones
in the melodic stream. My drum patterns are thus based on rhythm, interval, volume and, to a
limited extent, timbre.

In most musical situations drums play repetitive patterns. That is certainly the case, for example,
with African polyrhythms. Each player has a certain pattern to play and she plays it more or less
without variation for the duration of the performance, or performance segment. There may be
some variation here and there, but it’s not large and not systematic. In a given performance the
master drummer may signal a change, at which time everyone will switch to a new pattern. This
doesn’t happen often, and it always happens in prescribed and well-understood ways. The master
drummer is the only one who’s free to play something other than a repetitive pattern. Even then,
he’s generally not doing the sort of thing a jazz drummer or a tabla player does when they are
soloing; the range of variation is generally more restricted.

When I talk of free drumming I mean anything other than playing the same pattern over and over
and over without (significant) variation. Free drumming requires that you make a lot of choices.
So, how are those choices made?

In general, I haven’t the foggiest idea. But, in the course of working on one set of patterns, I
noticed that I seemed to be thinking in visual-motor terms when decided to switch from one

–9–
pattern to another within the same set. The patterns in this particular set involved six or strokes,
alternately right and then left. The stokes were made at isochronous intervals and differed with
respect to which tongues were hit. One pattern had all six strokes on one particular tongue,
another pattern had one stroke on each of the six tongues, in a particular order. If we assign the
tongues numbers, and designate strokes by L (for left) and R (for right) the set of patterns looks
like this:

1) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 1 1 1 1 1

2) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 2 2 2 2 2

3) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 2 3 3 3 3

4) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 2 3 4 4 4

5) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 2 3 4 5 5

6) stroke: R L R L R L
tongue: 1 2 3 4 5 6

This scheme doesn’t tell you about the spatial location of these tongues, and that is an important
aspect of execution. Tongues 1, 3, 5 and extend toward the center from the right side of the
drum face while tongues 2, 4, and 6 extend in from the left side.

When I say that I seemed to be using a visual-motor space in deciding to switch from one pattern
to another. Thus, in deciding to switch from, say, pattern 2 to pattern 3, I thought of it in terms
of where my hands were moving. I consciously directed my hands to move in a different way. In
this case the decision means that the right hand moves from tongue 2 to tongue 3 in order to
execute the third stroke in the pattern and then left hand moves from tongue 2 to tongue 3 in
order to execute the fourth stroke in the pattern. Both hands then remain at tongue 3 for the
fight and sixth strokes in the pattern (rather than continuing at tongue 2 as in the second pattern).

Once I had noticed that I seemed to be making decisions in visual-motor space I then “tested”
that observation by attempting to execute the choice in auditory space. That is, at some point I
decided I wanted to hear pattern three rather than pattern two. My hands then changed their
movements so that I could hear what I wanted to hear without me having explicitly to direct
them.

I then played around a bit and noticed that, in general, it is difficult for me to direct free drumming
activity using only auditory space. I can do it as long as the choices are from a limited set of
alternatives. But, if I want to be able to range freely through my repertoire of motor patterns for
drumming, then I have to make many, probably the majority, of the choices on a visual-motor
basis. [I do think my “decision space” is both visual-motor and auditory, but . . . . I’m now
straining at the limits of introspection.] I take this to mean that I don’t “hear” these patterns very
“exactly.” I think that that, in turn, means that I don’t have a good mapping between the visual-
motor execution space and the auditory perception space. So, to move freely I’ve got to make

– 10 –
many/most decisions in visual-motor space and hope that the result is pleasing in auditory space.

Often it is, but not always. Obviously I’d like to decrease the occurrence of displeasing sounds,
either by preventing them, or by developing strategies for playing a subsequent line that has the
effect of converting a “mistake” into an interesting little invention. But that’s a topic I don’t want
to go into now.

I now want to move onto another topic, the difference between improvisation and composed
music. As this little reflection of drummer seems suggestive on that score.

Reply to Freeman
on 4/6/02 4:16 PM, Walter Freeman at wfreeman@socrates.Berkeley.EDU wrote:

> Hi Bill,
> Better take this up with improvisational jazz musicians.
> As I understand it from Arom, Africans do complex polyrhythms in
> social settings, whereas what you describe is solo.

Yes on both accounts. Still, my understanding of the collective situation (and my experience of it
as well) is that most individuals are doing the same thing over and over and over. Changes will
creep in, but they are of a limited kind. Of course, as soon as I begin playing my drum with
others, the solo aspect disappears, even if I'm the only drummer. I do have some limited
experience with this.

One thing that deeply impresses me is just how difficult it is to maintain the same rhythm over a
long period of time. Free drumming is almost easier to maintain, though even there I will sooner
or later slip-up and burble the rhythm. No doubt practice will help.

Reply to Holloway
on 4/6/02 2:59 PM, Ralph L Holloway at rlh2@columbia.edu wrote:

> Don't know what to say, exactly. I try to imagine being a xylophonist, and
> imagine that spatial patterns might be important, sort of like when a kid
> starts fooling around on the piano, and tries different, almost geometric,
> patterns with the black keys, the white ones, combinations, etc,

Yes.

> . . . but this

> and the xylophone have isometrical tone intervals, and your drum
> apparently does not.

No, it doesn't. Nor do I have any strong desire to get one like that. I do have a small 8-key
marimba that's tuned pentatonically. But I don't find that as interesting, perhaps because it is a
tonal instrument, but one that is quite limited.

> The only other thought I have is that with a lot more
> practice, you will be doing more of what you want to do aurally.

– 11 –
If only I knew what I wanted! I don't have any examples I'm working from. I don't even know
where I'd look for examples. I've got one jazz album on which a superb drummer (Ed Blackwell)
plays a solo piece on a tongue drum. That's it.

The tongue drum doesn't seem to be a "serious" instrument played by "real" musicians. I find it
indicative that, wherever these drums are sold, the mallets sold with them are insubstantial sticks
with rubber balls glued to the end. I use marimba, tympani, or vibraphone mallets. The sticks
aren't so thin, making them easier to handle, and the heads are available in a range of hardnesses
and weights.

In any event I'm just making this up, seeing what I can do with the drum.

> Trumpet
> just gives 7 valve combinations, and many of those are "fake" or
> alternative fingerings, so that in essence it is too simple to use in a
> visual-motor sense.

Yes. One of the striking things about brass instruments is that they are one-handed, unlike most
other instruments. You use the left hand to hold or support the instrument, but that's all.
Almost other instruments require fluid bimanual coordination, though the nature of that
coordination varies from instrument to instrument.

And string instruments and woodwinds have still different characteristics. It's clear to me that, in
a general way, these characteristics do affect how these instruments are used. But I don't think
anyone has studied that in any detail. The folks who do performance psychology aren't interested
in such things - they've got their hands full dealing with expressive timing using instruments that
are easy to instrument (e.g. midi pianos).

Certain general characteristics are obvious enough to musicians. I'd be willing to bet that more
sophisticated music therapists pay close attention to the sensory-motor characteristics and
requirements of musical instruments. Dorita Berger has useful remarks along these lines in Music
Therapy: Sensory Integration and the Autistic Child.

– 12 –
MUSICAL SPACE
4.6.2002

This leads to a consideration of the nature of musical “spaces.” Consider the piano. As you
move from left to right on the keyboard, you move from lower to higher notes. Further, the
distance between keys on the keyboard is roughly proportional to the distance separate their
notes in pitch space — I say roughly between the distance between the pitches for successive
white keys isn’t always the same, which is also true for the black keys. This suggest that there is a
fairly transparent mapping between motor space and auditory space for the piano. The same is
true for marimba’s, xylophones, etc.

Things get more complicated with stringed instruments. Successive strings are not necessarily
tuned the same distance apart. This is true for the violin family and for guitars; I don’t know what
is generally true for the world’s various stringed instruments. But shortening the string at any
given point has the same relative effect on any string. Roughly, you can move in two dimensions
in visual-motor space when stopping strings, but those map onto only one dimension in pitch
space. Still, the mapping between auditory pitch space and visual-motor space is fairly coherent.

That is not at all the case for an instrument like the trumpet. Here the pitch is a function of
which valves are depressed, of tension in one’s embouchure, and of breath control. While there
is a direct relationship between embouchure tension, the breathing apparatus, and pitch, there is
no such relationship between pitch and valve settings. Any given valve setting corresponds to a
harmonic series of pitches. In some cases a given sequence of valve settings will correspond to
the same sequence of pitches in two different registers, this is not always the case. One
routinely uses different fingering combinations in different registers to produce the same set of
intervals.

Similarly, there is no clear correspondence between visual-motor positions and auditory pitches
for my tongue drum. This makes it difficult to develop a coherent mapping between those two
spaces such that I can, in effect, do all of my decision-making in the auditory space and be
confident that visual-motor space will take care of itself.

RECRUITMENT
4.8.2002

[snip 3 paragraphs containing an example involving remembering the identity of an actor on TV]

I think recruitment of one kind or another is ubiquitous. Another example: This morning I sat
down at my tongue drum to practice pattern I’d been working on last evening. To do that I had
to recall the patterns – I’m not working from written exercises. Let’s number the tongues 1
through six, starting with the far left, thus:

1 2
3 4
5 6

I remembered the pattern in these terms:

1. It started a right-hand stroke on 1.

– 13 –
 2. That was followed by a left-hand stroke on 5.
3. Then R2, L3, R6, L5, R4, L3.
4. In one version all interstroke intervals are isochronous; in another
version there’s a sequence somewhere in the early middle where two
intervals are half as long.
5. Left hand alternates between 3 and 5, starting on 3.
6. Right hand moves through the other four tongues in this sequence: 1, 2,
6, 4. I thought of this as a “circuit.”

Whatever it is that I recalled wasn’t quite that explicit, but that’s more or less the substance of it.
Notice, for example, the imprecision of item 4. Starting with this characterization, I had to play
around a bit before one of the patterns emerged in recognizeable form. I didn’t have to play
around very long for this to happen, on the order of 10s of seconds or a few minutes at most.
Once one version of the pattern emerged it stabilized fairly quickly and I went on to other
versions, tried some new variants, etc.

This sort of thing is quite common in my musical experience. It happens with the trumpet and
with whole songs and approaches to an improvisation, as opposed to relatively basic elements, as
in the above example. Further, I suspect that recruitment is an important part of the impact of a
musical performance, even one based on a completely notated score. In fact, it may be
particularly important in the case of notated scores; and the longer the score, the more important
recruitment becomes.

The idea is that the “impact,” “effect,” or “meaning,” of later passages depends on recruitment
resulting from the earlier passages. I suspect that many/most of the effects that interest Leonard
Meyer are mediated by recruitment, but that that doesn’t exhaust the range of recruitment
phenomena in musical performance.

DIVISIONS OF THE MOTOR SYSTEM

4.8.2002

It’s long been obvious to me that things are physically possible when you’re “psyched” that are
almost impossible when you’re not. What’s that about? It makes sense in a general sort of way
that one might, for example, have more energy. But that’s too vague.

Well, I was reading up on the motor system in Gordon Shepherd’s Neurobiology (3rd Ed., Oxford
UP 1994) and learned that we have three types of skeletal muscle fibers (I, slow and red; IIA
intermediate, pale red; IIB, white and fast) and corresponding types of motor units (pp. 388 ff.). I
suspect that different levels of “psych” involve differing levels of recruitment of these various
types of fibers (cf. pp. 450-451). It is also likely to involving different levels of involvement of the
extrapyramidal and pyramidal systems.

REPETITION & THE INNER OTHER

6.10.2002

For the past two or three weeks I’ve noticed a subtle difference when I play a pattern on the
tongue drum and hold it. It feels as though some “other being” is gently participating in my
playing, making things a little steadier. It’s not a dramatic sensation, it’s not strong, but it seems

– 14 –
real. For example, I noticed it yesterday when I was practicing a certain set of patterns (see
below). It didn’t happen immediately; but only after I’d been playing awhile (I don’t recall how
long). The “other” seemed to have a tempo preference as well. It first appeared when I was
playing the pattern a bit slower than usual. Once it became solidified I could pick up the tempo a
bit.

Here’s the patter, though the effect isn’t specific to this particular patter:

Using the convention from the “recruitment” entry of 4.8.2002 above, the basic pattern has two
forms, one “full” and the other “open.” In the full form, all the strokes are isochronous while the
open form has two interstroke intervals, one twice the other.

FULL: R5 L5 R4 L3 | R1 L3 R3 L3
OPEN: R5 L5 R4 L3 | R1 L3

TIMING AND PATTERN STABILITY

3.15.2003

Dear Walter,

I’ve got another story about musical timing for you. Again, this involves me playing a drum with
alternating strokes between hands. The basic pattern is a triplet pattern with the first note of
the tripled being high while the second and third notes are low:

(1) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X
low X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

Since I’m executing the pattern with strict alternation between hands, this means that the initial
note of a triplet alternates between hands. Getting used to this is a bit tricky; it seems easier and
more “natural” to execute triplets using one hand for the first note, which is often accented, and
the other hand for the second and third notes. If you execute triplets in this second way, then
your pattern of strokes is the same for each and every triplet, say, L R R, L R R, etc. If you
execute triplets by strict alternation, then you have two stroke patters which, however, sound
alike: L R L and R L R. It’s the alternation between these two same-sounding patterns that seems
tricky.

Why, then, would you want to execute triplets by this tricky strict alternation? Because you can
execute them more rapidly that way. If you aren’t interested in rapid execution, then you might
be better off doing it the easy way.

I’m interested in rapid execution. When I play the above pattern at the rate of 7 or more strokes
per second it breaks into two or three streams. I hear the upper notes as one stream, which is
clear and definite. At the same time I hear stream a stream of triplets consisting of both the
upper and lower notes. Thus the upper notes are participating in two auditory streams. At times
the lower notes will seem to form a stream of their own, though muddled. These streaming
effects are sensitive to tempo and amplitude and mallet hardness (which affects the spectrum,
with harder mallets seeming to have more prominent high partials). As interesting as these

– 15 –
streaming effects are, they aren’t the main story, though they probably have some bearing on it.

The main story is that, when executing the pattern at this tempo, the pattern will spontaneously
change. That is, it changes without any conscious intention on my part. I notice the change only
when I hear the different pattern, which goes like this:

(2) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X X X
low X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

Notice that this pattern begins with two strokes on the higher key. So, for some reason, my
motor system has decided to change the target of the second stroke in the pattern. That’s the
only difference between this and the previous (1) pattern. But this one change has the effect of
eliminating the tricky business about two different stroke patterns (L R L and R L R) having the
same sound. The stroke patterns aren't the same any more. The L R L pattern has changed from
High Low Low to High High Low while the R L R pattern has stayed the same, High Low Low.
The resulting auditory pattern is now quite different, becoming six strokes long, not three, and
the upper stream is quite different.

So, as I said, this switch can happen spontaneously. Once it has occurred, getting back to the
original pattern 1 can be quite difficult. If I slow down or stop and then restart, then getting back
is easy. But willing my way back while still maintaining the tempo is difficult to do. I may have to
go through several repetitions of the new pattern before my hands go back to playing the old one.
And then, more than likely, it will spontaneously shift to pattern 2 before long. Thus far, pattern 1
does not seem very stable at a high tempo. Pattern 2 is more stable; that is, it is much less likely
to revert to pattern 1 in the absence of my specific intention to do so.

Finally, I should note that I’ve been playing with this for several days now. I started out simply
trying to play the pattern 1 as fast as I could and maintain it over, say, a minute. When I noticed
the pattern spontaneously shifting, I got curious and decided to play around a bit and see what I
could control and how I’d have to do it. I do not, in fact, know if pattern 2 is what my hands
spontaneously shifted to, though it involves a change of only a single stroke. I’m sure about the
shift to a pattern where the two intial strokes where high, followed by a low, then a high; I’m not
so sure that the fifth and sixth strokes were always low, though it seems likely.

Now, it’s not so curious that the pattern should shift without my specific intention. When you’re
executing some physical action at the edge of your performance envelope you can count on things
getting out of control sooner or later. What’s more interesting is how difficult it is to return to
the old pattern while still maintaining tempo. Here it seems to me we’re in the territory Libet has
been exploring.

*****

Freeman’s Reply

Fascinating. Yes, it's Libet's territory, also Scott Kelso and his finger motion, which is the kind of
state transition you describe, only his was much simpler, a shift from in phase to anti-phase
locking with increasing tempo. He modeled that with Haken's synergetics.

– 16 –
It's also related to Stadler's ambiguity in visual figures such as Neckar cubes and the bride-mother-
in-law or duck-rabbit reversals that he modeled with stochastic resonance. Your phenomenon
goes far beyond in complexity of auditory structure, because the auditory system has to convert
temporal streams into spatial patterns with framing. I don't know how it does that.

I would call the states both before and after the state transition 'intentional', and the transition as
well, with the emphasis that induction of the two states are consciously so, whereas as the work
of Libet, Grey Walter, Deecke and Kornhuber indicated, the state transition is not.

Walter

*****

Reply to Freeman

Walter,

Your comments got me thinking about things again, especially your remark about “spatial patterns
with framing.”

I think that these two patterns are executed as auditory-motor gestalts (with the motor
component having targeting as a spatial element), one of which is well-formed while the other is
not. Here are the two patterns:

(1) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X
low X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

(2) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X X X
low X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

In the first case, the auditory system hears a three-note pattern that is repeated time after time.
But the motor isn’t like that because of the need for strict right-left alternation of strokes. Rather,
we have a three stroke pattern starting with the right hand alternating a three stroke pattern
starting with the left hand. So here the cycle is six units long. A well-formed audtiory-motor
gestalt would have the same number of units in both the auditory and motor components. The
second pattern is longer and more complex, but both the auditory and motor components are six
units long.

With that in mind, consider this pattern, which involves three tones:

(3) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X
mid X X
low X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

The idea here was to “convert” pattern 1 into a 6-unit gestalt by alternating between two notes

– 17 –
on the first note of the tripled so that the whole pattern requires a ‘high low low’ and a ‘mid low
low.’ I’ve experimented with this pattern a little and it doesn’t seem more stable than 1. Notice
that, while total pattern is six units long, the two subpatterns have the same second and third
tone. Let’s see what happens if we change that.

Consider pattern 4:

(4) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X
mid X X X X
low X X
bottom X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

I now how four tones and have two different 2-tone patterns. This seems more stable than 3,
despite the fact it’s also more difficult as I’m moving around from key to key more actively – I’ve
got four targets to hit rather than three.

Now consider these 6-unit patterns, which I’ve listed roughly in order of ease of rapid execution
(I’ve only experimented with this patterns for a few minutes):

(5) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X
low X X X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

(6) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X
low X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

(7) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X X X X X
low X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

(8) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X X X X X X X
low X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

(9) L R L R L R L R L R L R
high X X X X X X
low X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

Five is the easiest, 5 & 6 are easer than 7 & 8, while 9 is clearly the most difficult. Pattern 9 is like
1 in that it involves alternating three-stroke motor patterns.

*****

Now let’s look at this spatially, where the space is the physical location of targets for motor

– 18 –
action, the keys of the drum. The up-down motion of the basic strokes is executed through
control of wrists and fingers, with the two hands locked at anti-phase. Movement from one target
to another involves the whole arm.

Consider patterns 1 and 2 presented in a different way. The rows indicate right (rght) or left hand
strokes while the markers in the rows indicate targets (high and low):

(1a) rght H L L H L L
left L H L L H L
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

(2a) rght H L L H L L
left H H L H H L
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

In pattern 1 the right hand has ‘HLL’ as its target sequence while the left hand has ‘LHL’. Now
when we project this through several repeitions, here’s the right hand pattern (with commas
inserted for grouping): HLL,HLL,HLL . . . Here’s the left hand pattern: LHL, LHL, LHL . . . It’s
clear to me that, in general, this kind of segmentation is difficult to maintain. The cycle “wants” to
change to a state where two elements that are the same are adjacent in the same unit of
reptition, in either first and second, or second and third positions. In pattern 2 the right hand
target sequence is the same, while the left hand target sequence is ‘HHL’. This requirement has
now been met.

Just why this is so, is not clear to me; but I don’t want to try thinking it through at the moment.
this is enough for the moment.

Later,

Bill B

Now I want to get tricky. We’re dealing with repetitive patterns. Once the target tones have
been selected, they don’t change as long as we keep repeating the same pattern. So the system
that’s moving my arms from one target to another doesn’t have to worry about what those target
tones are. There are only two of them, so what’s relevant from stroke to stroke is whether or
not the target for the next stroke remains the same or changes. Consider this sequence or right
hand targets from pattern 1:

[H L S] [C C S] [C C S]

The bracketed sections are targets in a single repetition of the cycle. In the first repetition we
have High followed by Low, which initializes the two targets, followed by Same. The second and
all later repetitions are simply ‘Change, Change, Same’. Here’s the left hand target sequence for
pattern one:

[L H C] [S C C] [S C C]

Notice that successive repetitions of the cycle begin with a Same whose meaning must therefore
be retained from the previous repetition. I’m thinking that perhaps that’s more difficult.

– 19 –
STREAMING

From a note to Sasha Shulgin:2

These days I spend a lot of time playing my tongue drum (a wooden drum with six different "keys"
one strikes) and playing patterns with rapid alternating strokes from each hand -- left right left
right etc. Depending on just which keys I'm hitting, however, my ear hears two or three different
streams of sound without any very precise sense of their relationship to one another. That is,
what is there acoustically is a succession of tones, one after the other, at almost equal intervals.
But, when the tones are produced at the rate of six or more per second, the ear tends to group,
say, the high tones together in one stream and the low tones in a different stream.

Thus, I'm playing a single stream like this (H=high, L=low):

H H L H L L H H L H L L H H L H L L

|<--1 sec-->|<--1 sec-->|<--1 sec-->|

And I hear two streams like this:

H H H H H H H H H
L L L L L L L L L

|<--1 sec-->|<--1 sec-->|<--1 sec-->|

It is impossible to hear that the tones of one stream come in between the tones of the other
stream, though the motor system has to execute them that way. Depending on this that and the
other factor, it is possible for some tones to participate in two different streams and even to get
three streams going at once. There you have it, the mind creates two continuous streams out of
a single discontinuous series of tones (well . . . the sounds do not decay completely between
tones, so there is sonic continuity, but the amplitude certainly drops quickly once a key has been
struck and released).

It's really quite marvelous. This effect -- which is, by the way, called streaming in the acoustics
literature -- has practical consequences for musicologists trying to transcribe the different
components of West African drum ensembles. It is all but impossible to figure out who's playing
what line simply by listening to the sound and watching the players. Now, if you're a player in the
middle of this . . . what's the subjective effect of being unable to hear who's doing what?

2 Alexander Theodore "Sasha" Shulgin, Wikipedia: “... (June 17, 1925 – June 2, 2014) was an
American medicinal chemist, biochemist, organic chemist, pharmacologist, psychopharmacologist,
and author. He is credited with introducing MDMA ("ecstasy" or "molly") to psychologists in the
late 1970s for psychopharmaceutical use and for the discovery, synthesis and personal bioassay of
over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin.

– 20 –
FREE DRUMMING, ETC.
6.8.2003

Dear Walter and Ralph,

A bit over a year ago I sent you a note talking about my exporations of a wooden drum I’ve been
playing. In particular, I talked of the difficulty of doing what I called “free improvisation” and
located that difficulty, in part, in my inability to reliably predict the sounds I produced.

Well . . . About two or three weeks ago I was doing some free drumming and things began
“clicking” in a way they never had before. I was able to improvise long phrases of some
complexity that, all of a sudden, made sense to me. Improvement since that time has been steady
and rapid.

So, what happened? Well, I did a lot of practicing, that’s what. And some of that practicing was
free drumming, but I don’t think that’s the important part. The important stuff was simply learning
to play repetitive patterns, lots of them, and to switch smoothly from one pattern to another. In
fact, I would say that the main function of free drumming over the past year was to force some
fluidity into my playing. That is, to force me to change from one stroke pattern to another, and
to do so rapidly. That, combined with learning lots of patterns, finally reconfigured itself and, as a
result, I can now improvise in a satisfactory manner.

As I told you, I have been concentrating on patterns involving strict alternation between right- and
left-hand strokes to an isochronus beat. The major difficulty is in moving from one key to another
(out of six, with 3 or 4 of them having two distinctly different striking areas). That’s what creates
the pattern. What I’m listening for are the different “voices” or acoustic streams that emerge. I
generally like to keep two or three voices going at once – sometimes four. To do that I have to
think in terms of the tones in each voice stream, regardless of which hand is executing the strike.
The physical layout of the drum is such that it is quite easy to “confine” a voice to either right- or
left-hand strokes. But you also want to have voices that pass from one hand to another. You can
even create voices that “share” the same hit, that is, a given hit will be assimilated to two different
streams. One thing I’ve been playing with is to set up a two-stroke voice in the left hand against
the three-stroke voice in the right, for a period of six strokes. Depending on the pitches chosen,
this can set up a third voice that results from the interaction of these two voices where their
pitches “cross” one another. You can then move this third voice around by making small changes
in the three-note right hand voice.

If this all sounds complicated, well, it is and it isn’t. It’s not something I plot out explicitly, though
I certainly do think about what I’m doing. Rather, I practice my patterns, mess around free style,
and when something interesting shows up, I allow it to stabilize and I play with it a bit.

As I bonus, I have also found that playing three against four has become much more stable,
without my having worked on it at all. I just decided to try it out again – three in the left hand
against four in the right – and it worked. I don’t have much mobility with it, it’s pretty much
three LH strokes on one key against four RH strokes on a different key. By contrast, I have a
great deal of freedom with two (LH) against three (RH).

It is all most interesting.

Later,

– 21 –
Bill B

ADDING ELECTRONIC DRUM TO THE REPERTOIRE

8.16.2003 – 8.18.2003

Ralph, Walter,

I’ve gotten a new drum. It’s a Roland SPD-20 electronic drum. You wack it with a stick and
sound comes out of the speakers (or through the headphones). Just which sound comes out
depends on which “patch” you have selected. The instrument comes with over 700 sounds
which are arranged into 90 preset “patches” – the metaphor is from a patch board, which is how
the old analog synthesizers were configured. You can modify those patches and create your own.

Playing Surface & Stroke Paths

A patch maps sounds to the playing surface, which looks like this:

XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

The surface is rubber, about 18 inches wide and 12 inches deep, and divided into eight regions, as
above. Each region triggers a different patch. Additionally, you can ad various foot-actuated
triggers (I’ve added a kick pedal, such as used to play the bass drum in a traps set) and other stuff.
It’s a very sophisticated device.

But it took me a week to be fully satisfied that I hadn’t wasted my money. That’s what it took to
assimilate the instrument to my “playing-body” or, if you prefer, to adapt my “playing-body” to
the instrument. There are several issues.

I am used to playing a wooden drum, which I strike with rubber-tipped mallets. While you can
use those mallets on this electronic drum, they don’t work very well. The surface was designed
to be struck by sticks. So I had to find the right sticks and get used to a different “feel” in striking
the playing surface. That’s one problem, and it concerns a particular set of muscles and the neural
circuits that regulate them.

The layout of the playing surface is another problem. Here’s how my tongue-drum is laid out; this
is the playing surface I’m used to:

– 22 –
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX
ZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX

Notice this drum has only six keys while the Roland has eight pads; further, the layout is different.
So the strike-paths that worked on the tongue drum don’t work on the Roland. Some of this is
minor, some not. In general you want to avoid patterns where your sticks must cross. Patterns
that work well on one surface will not work on the other.

Note, however, that this is purely a matter of physical execution, not of how a pattern sounds,
which is what ultimately counts. Thus some cross sticking patterns might well be highly desirable,
and so one must practice ways of getting one stick out of the way of the other. It is my general
impression that a great deal of instrumental technique at intermediate and advanced levels
involves learning to do things which are physically difficult on a particular instrument, but musically
compelling. Every instrument has its physical idiosyncrasies. Some things will come quite easily,
some things are difficult. Wide interval leaps, for example, are relatively easy on the piano, but
difficult and exhausting on the trumpet. While my two drums are quite similar, they are not the
same. One of the challenges of the new (electronic) drum is to come up with executable
analogues to favorite patterns on the old a familiar (wooden) drum.

Sounds

Another issue concerns the sounds themselves. All the keys on the wood drum had pretty much
the same timbre, they were higher and lower, but the attacks and spectra were much the same.
Thus the sounds all blend well together, though, as I have explained before, it is relatively easy to
sustain two or three different voices by picking tones in distinctly different registers. Let us say
that tones of this drum are untuned – they do not sound well-defined pitches – and homogenous.

The new drum has three types of patches: non-homogenous and tuned homogenous. As far as I
can recall, this drum has no untuned homogenous patches, though there are some that come
close to it. Thus I now have to deal with creating rhythmic patterns that, on the one hand,
involve sounds of distinctly different timbres, and, on the other hand, have the same timbre but
are tuned to some scale.

Let’s consider the latter class of patches. Examples include: vibraphone, celeste, orchestral bells,
balaphon, tambura, gamelan bells, steel pan (drum), dulcimer, and others. I am quite familiar with
playing patterns in various scales; I do it all the time on the trumpet, and, to a lesser extent, on
the piano. But this is different. The drum has only eight pads, so I’m working with a limited range,
adequate for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “On Top of Old Smokey” but most of the tunes I
play on trumpet won’t fly. In any case, whatever tune I want to play, I have to learn the
correspondence between what I hear and the physical action I take to produce the sound. That is
not the same as it is for piano and certainly not the trumpet. So that’s something new to learn,
and it is a matter of rote practice and memorization. Beyond that, the object isn’t so much to
play melodies as it is to invent rhythmically interesting patterns. That’s a whole other world for
me to explore.

– 23 –
The non-homogenous patches present a different problem. There are various kinds of these, with
many of them derived from the traps drums prevalent in rock, jazz, and other popular styles. But
there are also patches based on Cuban, Brazilian, Korean, Indian, Japanese, etc. percussion
traditions. Here I have to figure out how to combine sounds of different kinds into interesting
patterns.

Kick Pedal

And then we have yet a different problem. I decided to get a kick pedal (and an appropriate signal
generating trigger) so I could play one sound with my foot while using my hands for other sounds.
There is a good musical reason for wanting to do this.

When building a rhythmic pattern you want to use one tone as an “anchor” tone. You repeat it
more or less in a constant pattern and add other rhythmic voices to it. As long as you keep
playing the anchor tone in a consistent pattern you can introduce quite a bit of variation in the
other voices without getting lost in musical chaos. Thus having an anchor tone is very important.
And it is quite convenient to have a foot trigger the anchor tone so that the hands can be free to
add in the complications.

So, now I’ve got to add foot/leg control into the physical mix. I quickly decided that I’d using my
left leg to play the pedal. Then it’s a matter of integrating it into things. One aspect of getting the
foot working is getting it synched up with the hands. The foot is further from the brain than the
hands, a distance that is significant given the relatively low transmission velocity of neural
impulses. It is also my impression is that the foot pedal gives a “looser” coupling to the striking
surface than the stick does. These are relatively minor issues, but one does have to think about
them just a little.

The more significant issue concerns independence. It would be one thing if I wanted the foot to
follow one of my hands. But that’s exactly what I don’t want. I want it to be independent of my
hands. Sometimes it will be striking with the left hand, sometimes with the right hand, and
sometimes with neither. All of this requires specific, deliberate, conscious, practice. It does not
happen spontaneously.

Let us consider some examples. All of the examples involve 4-stroke patterns that are repeated.
Think of these strokes as 16th notes in quarter time or 8th notes in cut time.

Consider the first pattern, which was quite easy to execute. The (left) foot and left hand are
synchronized and the right-hand makes its strokes at twice their rate.

Rhand X X X X X X X X
Lhand X X X X
Lfoot X X X X
Stroke 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

The following pattern is the same except that the left-foot only strikes on 1, rather than 1 and 3.

– 24 –
Rhand X X X X X X X X
Lhand X X X X
Lfoot X X
Stroke 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

I find that executing that pattern is mainly a matter of inhibiting the left-foot from striking on 3. Its
“natural” tendency is to synchronize with the left hand, which it does on the first stroke. Hence it
takes a positive effort on my part to prevent the left foot from striking on 3. Sometimes what
happens is that, after not striking on 3, it won’t strike on the following 1 either.

Now consider this pattern:

Rhand X X X X X X
Lhand X X X X
Lfoot X X
Stroke 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

It is the same as the previous one, except that I’ve eliminated the right-hand strike on 3. That is
not terribly difficult. But, now there is a tendency for the foot to strike on 4, along with the right
hand, rather than waiting until 1.

Finally, consider this last pattern, for which I’ve given four repetitions, with the third being
different from the other two:

Rhand X X X X X XX X
Lhand X XX X X
Lfoot X X X X
Stroke 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Notice that the basic pattern has the left foot striking on the first stroke, followed by the left
hand on the second one, and the right hand on three and four. However, in the third repetition,
the left hand also strikes on 4. In doing so it tends to “drag” the foot along with it. So the foot
must be deliberately inhibited from striking with the left hand. Which then creates a problem, as it
must be free to strike on the first stroke, which follows immediately.

Neural Control

My experience with the kick pedal leads me to speculate that the neural mechanism that
generates the basic timing pulse must be pretty “deep” in the system and it seems to send the
pulse to the entire body. Even before I got the kick pedal, my whole body – not just arms and
hands – would move to the beat once I got rocking. One almost literally “dances” on the drums.

Given this basic body-wide timing pulse, playing a differentiated pattern then requires that this
body-wide impulse be inhibited in appropriate ways. I further speculate that this basic timing
pulse is not strong enough to drive the muscles itself. Rather, it serves as a reference pulse to
which the driving impulses can be synched.

[In the back of my mind I’m thinking of a relatively simple animal, a water-dwelling chordate that
moves by flexing its whole body. That’s the creature that is generating the basic timing impulses.

– 25 –
The wiggly worm within.]

Some indicators: 1) I find it very difficult to play loudly with one hand and softly with the other;
that is, to have different amplitudes in my two hands. In fact, I haven’t even attempted to train
myself to do this; I assume it can be done, but I have no idea what kind of effort it will take. Given
that the muscle systems for the two arms are largely separate, this difficulty is not a mechanical
problem. It must be a function of neural control. 2) I find it difficult to play distinct phrases, with
pauses between them, in one hand (the left) while keeping up a continuous pattern with the other
hand (the right). When I go to pause the left hand – that is, stop playing for a stroke “slot” or
three – my right hand will stop as well. I think this problem is more tractable than the differential
amplitude problem.

So, where are these things happening? Let’s say that the basic timing pulse is generated in the RF.
I assume that the inhibition is cortical, most likely frontal. I will then guess that the driving
impulses are generated in the basal ganglia. So, the RF generates a timing pulse which synchs
driving impulses originating in the basal ganglia. The frontal cortex “shapes” or “sculpts” the body
of driving impulses by directing inhibitory impulses to . . . where? The basal ganglia, the thalamus?

Come Together, 4 & 3

Some time ago a spent a great deal of time learning to play the following pattern on a two-headed
bell (a higher and a lower tone):

(1) high: X X X
low: X X X X X X

Normally we would phrase this in three:

(2) high: X X X
low: X X X X X X
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

Instead, I was interested in phrasing it in four:

(3) high: X X X X
low: X X X X X X X X
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

After some practice I was able to do so. That is, I could easily count four in my mind while
playing the pattern. But it was difficult to hear any difference between playing the pattern in three
(as in 2), its “natural” phrasing, and playing it in four.

Now that I have drums with a kick pedal, I can do that by using the kick pedal to sound a tone on
the first beat, thus:

(4) Lhand: X XX X
Rhand: X XX X X X X X
Foot: X X X
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

– 26 –
Notice how the foot-triggered beat lines up with the right and left-hand patterns and with the
underlying four beat repetition. Now the four-beat pattern is delineated in the sound in a way
that allows one to hear it superimposed on the three-beat pattern played in the right and left
hands.

Freeman reply

> hi bill,
> you're an einstein-poincaré of motor skills.
>
> somewhat resembles my 4-limb involvement learning to fly a glider.
> your intuition of 'deep' structure is right on target.
> resonates with my current work on scale-free structure and
> phase transitions in cerebral cortex.
> will send preprint when it's ready.

Thanks. I'll be most interested to read it.

Meanwhile I've been thinking that drumming on electronic pads would be a good activity for our
experiments. You don't move your head much, even during vigorous drumming, though there's
probably a good bit of contraction and relaxation in the muscles of the head and neck as part of
the overall muscular effort. If would make a worthwhile difference, you could even immobilize
the head (perhaps with a bite bar) without much of an effect on the drumming.

That issue aside, you've got all levels of motor coordination and planning at your finger tips, from
the simplest repetitive tapping to the most complex poly-rhythms with the opportunity for long
soloistic patterns of activity. The drums I use are MIDI instruments, so we can capture both the
digital control signals and the analogue wave that's sent to the amplifier.

*****

One particular point, I've just noticed that it is quite difficult to strike simultaneously with two
sticks. Of course, you might well ask, just what do I mean by simultaneous? What I mean is
indisguisheable by ear.

The problem is most noticeable when both sticks are striking a pad that's triggering a sound with
a very sharp-edged attack. You don't so much hear two distinct attacks -- they're too quick for
that -- as a short buzz on the attack. That buzz isn't there if you strike the pad with only one
stick. The double-attack isn't as noticeable if you are striking two different pads triggering two
different sounds or if you are striking a pad where the sound isn't so hard-edged.

I first noticed this when I was playing 3-on-2 on only one pad. When you do this --as opposed to
3 strokes on one pad against 2 on another -- you hear only one voice, thus:

X XXX X XXX X XXX X

1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1

It is easy to play that pattern by alternating strokes between the hands, thus:

– 27 –
R X X X X X X X
L X X X X X X
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1

When played that way there's only one stick hitting the pad at a time. When you execute the
pattern as 3-against-2, however, things change:

R X X X X X X X X X X
L X X X X X X X
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1

Notice that that two hands are always aligned on the first beat of a 3-beat sequence.

Once I noticed this happened I spent some little time concentrating on getting the two strokes
together. Concentration does allow me to narrow the difference and, in some cases, to produce
some attacks where I cannot hear any difference between the two hands. But I suspect it may be
impossible to get the attacks to be absolutely (that is, indistinguishable by ear) simultaneous time
after time after time. My guess is that has as much to do with the biomechanics of sticking as with
the nervous system.

– 28 –