An ethnographic and technological study of breakbeats in hardcore, jungle and drum & bass
Jason Hockman · 2014
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United Kingdom's DJ-oriented electronic music community embraced new technologies and developed innovative techniques to master these technologies, resulting in the development of new genres. Three such genres, Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum & Bass (HJDB), emerged at the critical intersection between computer technology and the consumer market, which allowed computer music to be made through the use of home-based The essential instrument in HJDB was the digital sampler, a device that offered musicians the ability to achieve realistic instrumentation through a cut-and-paste method of production. The thread that ties these three genres together was their unique usage of fast-paced sampled drums, derived primarily from breakbeats—samples of short percussion solos typically from 1960s to 1980s Funk and Jazz recordings. This dissertation explores a number of important issues that have not been addressed in prior writing on HJDB, and consists of three main objectives. The first is to provide a written history of the genres from the perspective of those that have made the music. This history catalogues the origins of the United Kingdom's DJ-oriented electronic music genres, the incorporation of breakbeats into this music that created the Hardcore genre, and developments that then resulted in the creation of the Jungle genre and subsequently the Drum & Bass genre. The second objective is to provide an explanation of the main technologies used in the creation of this music (e.g., the digital sampler) and the techniques developed by musicians to harness this technology. The third objective is to provide methods for the computational analysis of HJDB music, through automated determination of the breakbeats being used, detection of downbeat locations, and an estimation of the degree of rhythmic modification. Each of these objectives has been informed by over twenty interviews with musicians and label owners from throughout the history of HJDB. Computational methods based on HJDB-specific knowledge are shown to significantly outperform generalized music analysis techniques, highlighting the importance of style-specific approaches for computational musicology.%%%%Durant la fin des annees 80 et le debut des annees 90 au Royaume Uni, le monde de la musique electronique destinee aux DJ a adopte de nouvelles technologies et developpe des techniques innovantes pour les maitriser, aboutissant ainsi au developpement de nouveaux genres. Trois de ces genres, Hardcore, Jungle, et Drum & Bass (HJDB), ont emerge au croisement critique entre la technologie numerique et le marche grand public, permettant la production de musique numerique dans les home studios. L'instrument cle en HJDB etait l'echantillonneur numerique, un appareil offrant aux musiciens la possibilite de realiser une instrumentation realiste grâce a une methode de production couper-coller. Le point commun entre ces trois genres etait l'utilisation d'extraits de batterie au rythme rapide, principalement derives des…