Tabla Breakbeat Science

What started off as a class experiment, tabla breakbeat science quickly grew into a small fusion band at NYU. In spring 2013, Ethan Hein conducted an experiment as part of a project for his psychology of music class that studied the way people clap to funk/dance music. He was testing to see whether his subjects knew to clap on the backbeats or not. Since he didn't give any prompts, I attempts to clap tabla patterns over the beats in his study. He found these responses to be very interesting. After the project was over, we thought it would be cool to hear me improvise on the tabla over various classicbreakbeats. We did a couple of recording sessions, and they were a lot of fun. This gave birth to Tabla Breakbeat Science.

Tabla Breakbeat science quickly grew as we recruited our classmates at NYU. We decided to create an album. It's called Music Information Retrieval, because our studio time was sponsored by NYU’s Music and Audio Research Lab — we contributed to a database of multitracks that will be used for music informatics research. In this album, we had a great range of instruments; Ethan Hein on the Baritone guitar and vocals, Rebecca Feynberg on vocals and electronic synths, Christopher Jacoby on the mandolin, Rachel Wardell on accordion and midi-accordion, and myself on the tabla and finger cymbals.

Listen to a few tracks below.

FULL ALBUM