A Stimulus Set of 40 Popular Music Drum Patterns with Perceived Complexity Measures

This study presents an audio stimulus set of 40 drum patterns from Western popular music with empirical measurements of perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness information, and highly precise onset timing measurements. The 40 stimuli are a subset selected from a previously published larger corpus of reconstructed Western popular music drum patterns (Lucerne Groove Research Library). The patterns were selected according to two criteria: a) they only feature the bass drum, snare drum, and one or more cymbals, and b) they plausibly cover the complexity range of the corpus. Perceived stimulus complexity was measured in a listening experiment using a pairwise comparison design with 220 participants (4,400 trials). In each trial, participants were presented with two stimuli, and they stated which of the two sounded more complex to them. The comparison data then served to calculate complexity estimates using the Bradley–Terry probability model. The complexity estimates have an intuitive interpretation: they allow calculation of the probability that one pattern is considered more complex than another pattern in a pairwise comparison. To our knowledge, this is the first set of naturalistic music stimuli with meaningful perceived complexity estimates. The drum pattern stimuli and complexity measurements can be used for listening experiments in music psychology. The stimuli will further allow measures and models of drum pattern complexity to be assessed.