Analyzing Drumming Technique with Trajectory Optimization

ABSTRACT Percussion began as a global phenomenon over seven thousand years ago and has continued to develop and shape human culture to this day. While drumming techniques have been qualitatively optimized in highly competitive environments like international orchestral, jazz, and marching arts competitions, little quantitative optimization has been performed to maximize technique efficiency and few tools currently exist to make a thorough quantitative analysis possible. Here, I demonstrate how trajectory optimization can be applied to the domain of percussion to (1) identify areas of suboptimality in experimental drumming strokes, (2) search for alternative locally optimal techniques, (3) analyze the sensitivity of optimal drumming techniques to variation in a drummer’s body type, and (4) analyze trends across different stroke types to create generalizable drumming strategies for a more coherent and efficient approach to drumming. Each of these quantifiable outcomes is interpreted to provide teachable insights for percussionists that are difficult to distill simply using the human eye and qualitative feedback. I also provide an open-source codebase for efficiently performing trajectory optimization on a biomechanical drumming arm model so that others can adapt this methodology for further biomechanical analysis and pedagogical development.