Exploring Sound-Motion Textures in drum set performance

A musical texture, be that of an ensemble or of a solo in- strumentalist, may be perceived as combinations of both simultaneous and sequential sound events. However, we believe that also sensations of the corresponding sound- producing events (e.g. hitting, stroking, bowing, blowing) contribute to our perceptions of musical textures. Musical textures could thus be understood as multimodal, with features of both sound and motion, hence the idea here of sound-motion textures in music. The study of such multi- modal sound-motion textures will necessitate collecting and analyzing data of both the produced sound and of the sound-producing body motion, thus entailing a number of methodological challenges. In our current work on sound- motion textures in music, we focus on short and idiomatic figures for different instruments (e.g. ornaments on vari- ous instruments), and in this paper, we present some ideas, challenges, and findings on typical sound-motion textures in drum set performance. Drum set performance is parti- cularly interesting because the often very complex textures are produced by one single performer, entailing a number of issues of human motion and motor control.