Those drummers

Although he doesn't post it HERE, Danny has been crazy active in several bands, drumming away.

Here's one of the more recent posts on The Meta Accord's youtube site. Only thing is, you can't really see Mr, hiding behind a cymbal.


So I was intrigued to read about an experiment to see how drummers perceive time. The experiment was a collaboration of music producer Brian Eno and neuroscientist David Eagleman. It drew drummers across a wide variety of genres, including Daniel Maiden-Wood (Anna Calvi), the drummer from Razorlight, and Will Champion (Coldplay).

“The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno said. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.”

So drummers EEG's were tested vs controls in respect to their perception of time.

When asked to keep a steady beat, for instance, the controls wavered by an average of thirty-five milliseconds; the best drummer was off by less than ten. Eno was right: drummers do have different brains from the rest.

Like perfect pitch, which dooms the possessor to hear every false note and flat car horn, perfect timing may just make a drummer more sensitive to the world’s arrhythmias and repeated patterns, Eagleman said— to the flicker of computer screens and fluorescent lights.

Reality, stripped of an extra beat in which the brain orchestrates its signals, isn’t necessarily a livelier place. It’s just filled with badly dubbed television shows.

I always knew there was something unique about how Dan saw the world...