TapTamDrum: A Dataset for Dualized Drum Patterns

Drummers spend extensive time practicing rudiments to develop technique, speed, coordination, and phrasing. These rudiments are often practiced on "silent" practice pads using only the hands. Additionally, many percussive instruments across cultures are played exclusively with the hands. Building on these concepts and inspired by Einstein's probably apocryphal quote, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler," we hypothesize that a dual-voice reduction could serve as a natural and meaningful compressed representation of multi-voiced drum patterns. This representation would retain more information than its corresponding monotonic representation while maintaining relative simplicity for tasks such as rhythm analysis and generation. To validate this potential representation, we investigate whether experienced drummers can consistently represent and reproduce the rhythmic essence of a given drum pattern using only their two hands. We present TapTamDrum: a novel dataset of repeated dualizations from four experienced drummers, along with preliminary analysis and tools for further exploration of the data.