Finding Drum Breaks in Digital Music Recordings

Abstract

DJs and producers of sample-based electronic dance music (EDM) use breakbeats as an essential building block and rhythmic foundation for their artistic work. The practice of reusing and resequencing sampled drum breaks critically influenced modern musical genres such as hip hop, drum’n’bass, and jungle. While EDM artists have primarily sourced drum breaks from funk, soul, and jazz recordings from the 1960s to 1980s, they can potentially be sampled from music of any genre. In this paper, we introduce and formalize the task of automatically finding suitable drum breaks in music recordings. By adapting an approach previously used for singing voice detection, we establish a first baseline for drum break detection. Besides a quantitative evaluation, we discuss benefits and limitations of our procedure by considering a number of challenging examples.