This project is an investigation of melodic drum-kit practices in popular and contemporary music. The development of melodic drum-kit playing techniques has helped create a more inclusive role for drum-kit players within ensembles and has increased the potential for drum-kit players to present solo elements in performance. The project artefacts of my research are six compositions presented on CD. They demonstrate performance and compositional techniques that encourage a melodic approach to drum-kit performance. My research involved several methodological approaches these included: a) professional practice-based research, b) music composition and transcription, c) interviews with significant musicians familiar with drum-kit melodic practices and d) elements of autoethnography. I refer to particular drum-kit performance techniques and practices such as mirroring, thinking melodically, spatial relationships between drum-kit instruments and ensemble players, as well as, internalising melodic and harmonic ideas and being in the moment. I have shown in my compositional project that melodic elements in drum-kit performance and composition encourage a broader and more inclusive role for drummers in improvised performance. This is evident in the ensemble versions of compositions submitted as part of this study.

Studiens syfte är att utifrån ett genusperspektiv studera hur trumlektioner genomförs i musik- och kulturskola. Forskningsfrågor är: Vilka förutsättningar för lärande ges killar respektive tjejer i trumundervisning? Hur arbetar trumlärare med det sociala samspelet, val av undervisningsmaterial, kravställningar och förväntningar på sina elever, sett utifrån ett genusperspektiv? För att undersöka detta har tre kvalitativa intervjuer och sex deltagande videoobservationer genomförts. Tidigare studier visar bland annat att musiklärare förväntar sig en feminin och maskulin stil av sina elever, att det är svårt som tjej att positionera sig på ett sätt som utmanar den lokala genusregimen samtidigt som det är svårt att vara traditionellt feminin – måttfull och kontrollerad - när det ska spelas instrument som elbas och trumset. I föreliggande studies resultat visas trumlärarnas syn på trumundervisning men också hur de genomför sin undervisning och hur kill- och tjejelever hanteras i undervisningen. Där framkommer att lärarna i stor utsträckning anpassar undervisningen efter elevernas personligheter och individuella förutsättningar och inte efter könstillhörighet, men att trumlärarna uttrycker vissa fördomar som kan peka på att de förväntar sig att se en feminin och maskulin stil hos sina elever. Diskussion förs om problematiken i att instrument och yrken är genuskodade, vilket kan påverka elevernas förutsättningar för lärande, och om lärares eventuella fördomar samt att vi lärare måste anpassa oss efter eleverna och inte tvärtom. / The purpose of this study is to, from a gender perspectice, explore how the drum kit lessons in three music and culture schools are performed. To investigate this, three qualitative interviews and six participant video observations have been implemented. Previous studies show that music teachers expect a feminine and masculine style of their students, that it is difficult as a girl to position themselves in a way that challenges the local gender regime while it is difficult to be traditionally feminine - moderate and controlled – when playing instruments such as electric bass and drum kit. In the present studies results, drum teachers’ views on drum teaching are shown but also how they conduct their teaching, and how boy- and girl students are handled in teaching. It emerges that teachers largely adapt teaching to students’ personalities and individual circumstances and not to gender, but the drum teachers express certain prejudices which may indicate that they expect to see a feminine and masculine style of their students. There is a discussion about the problems of instruments and professions being gender-coded, which can affect students’ learning conditions, and teacher prejudices and that teachers have to adapt to the students and not vice versa.

This thesis deals with the design and implementation of a tool for generating drums triggers from a downmix record. The work describes the preprocessing of the input audio signal and methods for the classification of strokes. The drum classification is based on the similarity of the signals in the frequency domain. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the number of dimensions and to find the characteristic properties of the input data. The method support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify the data into individual classes representing parts of the drum kit. The software was programmed in Matlab. The classification model was trained on a set of 728 drum samples for seven categories (kick, snare, hi-hat, crash, ride, kick + hi-hat, snare + hi-hat). The success of the system in the classification is 75 %.

This study investigated the terms used by drummers and audio engineers to describe the recorded drum kit and the processing applied to it. The main method consisted of semi-structured interviews with six professionals in the fields of drumming and audio engineering. The participants were asked to describe five musical samples of different drum kit mixes containing kick, snare and hi-hat sounds. Their descriptions along with explanations of their communication tactics were compared, resulting in explanations of fourteen semantic descriptors. The comparison of their use of the terms in the context of the samples revealed some differences depending on their professional backgrounds. The results suggested that, while audio engineers have a larger semantic lexicon in regards to the recorded drum kit, the differences in the definitions of terms had a larger degree of variation between individuals than between the respective professions.