The hip-hop collective “Ta Dhom Project”—which gained prominence in India after being featured on the soundtrack of the 2019 film “Gully Boy”—showcases in their songs rap lyrics in a variety of regional Indian languages, vocal refrains inspired by South Indian drum phrases, and the timbres of the classical drum mridangam. Given that many South Asian listeners will not understand all the lyrics in the multiple languages used in these songs, the musical experience for these listeners likely includes attending to the phonemic timbres of unfamiliar languages and orienting toward the sonic patterning created through the rhyme schemes. Through analyzing the rhyme schemes of the rapping and the patterns played on the drums in Ta Dhom Project’s song “K-Rap,” I suggest that unenculturated listeners’ experience of the music is shaped by expectations of timbral signposts such as recurring rhyming syllables and recurring drum strokes. This analysis will serve to nuance theories of sequential expectations (Roeder 2025) and sound-color regions (Lerdahl 2026) in the context of music and poetry performance, and provide a contrasting case study to the Tamil rapping in Malaysia explored by Paige (2024). I also discuss the cultural significance of mridangam drum timbres being featured in a hip-hop track and the political implications of featuring multilingual lyrics in a multicultural society, contributing to ethnomusicological debates on the relationship of iconic sounds to demarcated social identities.

People listen to and understand music based on their prior experiences, including their cultural experiences (Bourne 2025). Building on this idea, this paper aims to provide a method for analyzing music while accounting for how cultural background influences interpretation of beat structure. I apply this approach to Tanya Tagaq’s “Ilunikavi,” examining beat structure through two lenses: the composer’s and my own. Using video recordings and adapting methods from Abrahams 2019, I compare the icti (sharp, delineated movements) indicated by Tagaq, an Inuk artist with an intimate knowledge of Inuit throat singing, and myself, a white Canadian listener without direct connections to Inuit culture. I then compare these moments to changes in vocal timbre to suggest that timbre plays a large role in how we both entrain to the beat, though we entrain to the timbres differently. I contextualize these observations within broader discussions of cultural conceptions of time—contrasting Inuit ecological notions of time with Western mechanical frameworks (Gombay 2009; Keyes 2009; Smith 2007)—and their implications for rhythm and meter (Grant 2014; Scherzinger 2019). Ultimately, this paper demonstrates a methodology for analyzing music through multiple cultural perspectives, using this case study to reveal the nuanced ways that cultural experience shapes musical understanding.

In this presentation I demonstrate the ways in which Western drumset musicians use “orchestration” as a pedagogical concept for creativity and technique. To drummers, this term refers to a specific relationship between timbre, rhythm, and kinesthesia. Through orchestration, drummers can transform a single rhythmic figure into multiple grooves, fills, and exercises that vary in timbre and pitch. I explicate this process through analysis of method books (Guiliana 2016; Ventimiglia 2023) and educational social media posts by drummers Clarence Penn, CJ Hökdal, and Johnny Mathar. This shows that orchestration is not just a useful term for drummers, but also one with specific in-group meanings that are both akin to and distinct from conventional definitions of the term. As such, in this presentation I also use the drumset to expand academic understandings of orchestration. I place drumset orchestration in conversation with work by McAdams et al. (2022), Dolan (2013), Spitzer and Zaslaw (2004), and Winikoff (2024). Through this, I propose that (1) orchestration can occur spontaneously as opposed to solely before performance; (2) composers and arrangers are not the only agents of orchestration; and (3) orchestration does not require multiple musicians or instruments. I also push back against common beliefs that drums are primarily rhythmic. Finally, I analyze excerpts by jazz great Max Roach to display other ways in which the concept of orchestration can be understood through a drumset lens. It is my hope that this approach can help academics better understand orchestration, the drumset, and the relationship between the two.

In his groundbreaking Jazz Consciousness, Dr. Paul Austerlitz quoted drummer Milford Graves. “A lot of musicians do not realize that they should listen to the drum tonally; they think of it as a rhythm thing. You cannot separate rhythm from melody, time from tone….time and tone go together” (2005, 175–176). What blocks some listeners from hearing the melodies that drummers compose from rich timbral palettes? The timbres of many if not most drum sounds tend toward inharmonicity (Richardson 2010, Roberts n.d., and Rossing 2000), but must inharmonicity preclude melody? What roles do culture and musical experience play in the perception of melody (Stevens 2004)? This study offers evidence of melodic phrasing in the music of a master drummer from Haiti. Even in the solitude of a recording studio, where he was not working with a chorus in a temple or a dance troupe on a stage, he created melodies replete with motifs, phrases, and periods in perceptible conversational structures. In using the word “conversational,” I extend the thinking of Meki Nzewi, who discussed Igbo drummers’ use of timbre (“tonal structure”) as conjugate phrasing, with antecedents and consequents (2008, 156). This phrasing resonates with the technique that Willi Anku saw as “a compositional device found to facilitate communal music participation” in Africana traditions (1997, 217). Examination of four samples from the Haitian drummer’s repertory unveils evidence of timbre-enabled conversation. This study offers ethnomusicology a window into the entanglement of timbre with melody, harmony, form—in short, all dimensions of music.