Hi
I understand what sweep time and sweep depth do, and that they can of course be used in unintended and creative ways, but in the history of drum synthesis what aspect of a natural drum sound are these parameters intended to model?
Thanks
Jim
probably way off here but a combo of drum size, drum skin, how hard you hit, and with what materials
I’m going to hazard a guess here. The initial click/slap when a stick hits a drum skin?
When you strike something hard it temporarily increases in pitch before dropping to the fundamental. For instance when you strike a guitar string hard the pitch is slightly higher for a brief moment before dropping to the fretted note.
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Make sense, thanks!
I think the click has more to do with the pedal/stick actually hitting the membrane as opposed to the membrane vibrating. It seems likes its almost an artificial distinction though,
The click is typically above 1kHz while sweep time/depth typically affects frequencies below that such as the bump around 100-200 Hz and the sub region.
Here is an interesting for anyone with the time and math background.
when mixing real drums the click (or, the “coin” in sweden, comes from old rock practice i.e. fastening a coin just where the felt hits the drum for even more of a “spankin” hit) often lies around 5khz. However, sweep and time is as stated, things that happen differently depending how the drum is tuned and how it is played (how hard you hit, and where you hit). Thats basically that. Of course the material and quality of the drum plays a big role, but that’s above my head at least 
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I think you’ve thought about this a lot more than I have. 
I think it represents the stretching of the medium.
When you hit a drum or a string it will actually stretch to accomodate the waveform. And if you stretch the medium you raise the pitch.
When the amplitude gets lower the frequency also becomes lower.
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