Rhythmic Experimentation

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Winspear

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I'm still scratching my head over this one - the examples sound very cool, especially Miwa, but my little brain just isn't comprehending it haha. I'm not sure what's changing, the tempo, the length of the bar? I'm trying to comprehend what "50% of the way between these two notations" means but can't get my head around how you work out how that sounds/what it would look like written. Great blog post though! Perhaps it would be easiest to see it as blocks on a DAW piano roll where we can see 'time' easily.
 
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mutime-graph.jpg
 

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Winspear

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Great, I see you added it to your blog with explanation. That's really helpful, thanks for taking the time to make that addition. It makes more sense to me now. I wasn't sure where the straight version was coming from but I think I understand it's just created to notate the melody neatly and as a measure to then set the % to. The equation is simple enough and so is doing it visually (though a bit less accurate, probably audibly the same). Excited to try writing with this!
 
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Glad to hear it! This example is a bit awkward because the original song already had a rhythmic pattern going with it, while native microrhythmic compositions (at least those that I've seen) usually start with a theme or motif that is played on notes of equal length. Only then an arbitrary rhythmic pattern is imagined and a percentage value comes with it. I've come from the opposite angle, taking a song that was not microrhythmic and "softening" the existing rhythmic pattern with the same motif played on notes of equal length. I think this makes things more confusing, really. If I knew it beforehand, I would've written a native microrhythmic song instead of morphing one that isn't microrhythmic, but it shows the possibilities of the theory and I think that's a good trade-off.
 

bostjan

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Some of the formatting isn't working for my browser (Google Chrome):

With a Westerner’s musical eye, this time signature is instantly recognized as [Math Processing Error], divided in beats of 1, 2, 2, and 2 eighth notes. This is the opposite of most [Math Processing Error] bars we hear in prog music, which display a 2, 2, 2, and 1 beat subdivision.

In IE, everything appears normal, though:

With a Westerner’s musical eye, this time signature is instantly recognized as 7/8 , divided in beats of 1, 2, 2, and 2 eighth notes. This is the opposite of most 7/8 bars we hear in prog music, which display a 2, 2, 2, and 1 beat subdivision.
 

Zender

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Jan Rivera’s Advanced Rhythmic Concepts for Guitar belongs next to every copy of Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns.

So, is there a tabs variant of this one? I can read music, but I still can't transpose it to the fretboard.
 
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Some of the formatting isn't working for my browser (Google Chrome):



In IE, everything appears normal, though:

Thanks for mentioning it! It's a plugin for wordpress for math formulas, I use it mostly for musical purpose. I use Chrome and I see it fine, that's weird. Thanks for putting it here though.
 
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Hi, I've been interested in microrhythms for a while, especially after reading jazz pianist Malcolm Braff's thoughts and works on it. I've even wrote a post about that concept on my website.

For those who don't know, microrhythms are rhythmic subdivisions of time that don't fall easily into our standard Western notation system. It's quite common in many cultures, perhaps more prominently in Gnawa music, for example. David Bruce also made an amazing video after I suggested the topic to him.

I had previously written out a way to manually create microrhythms in MIDI, and provided an example of this on my post about it, but it was quite laborious a process. Thus, I've decided to start working on a program to automate it.

With a few hours' work, I've come up with this program. What you need to feed it is one MIDI file containing two tracks. I based it on Braff's notation system, which is a comparison of two patterns. Braff usually goes for straight, even notes and then some pattern to conjugate it with, and the goal is to play somewhere "between" the two. In theory, though, you can use two different rhythmic patterns, whatever they are, so long as they both have the same number of notes in them.

The program goes through each note of the two tracks, analyzes their duration, and outputs a note with a duration 50% between the two. In Braff's notation, that would mean a 50% morph. It would be very easy, however, to alter the program and make it play another morph value, for example 75% towards pattern 1, or 90%, and so on.

Since it's very early, I assume the program is not very solid. It will probably fail if you send it complex MIDI files. For example, it behaves badly when there are multiple voices, so use only monophonic tracks. I also don't know how it will behave with pitch bends, tempo changes, time signature changes, rests, and many other MIDI objects and actions.

If you'd like to try it and create microrhythmic music, the link is below. What I do to make it work is that I create MIDI tracks in a DAW (Reaper in this instance) and export the two tracks in one MIDI file. Feel free to try other ways, but I can't guarantee the results. If you end up making music using this program, please post it here, I'd be delighted to hear it! Also, feel free to offer suggestions and point out glitches or issues with it.

Link to Github
 

bostjan

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I took a listen earlier. It's obvious that the rhythm is different, but it doesn't overpower the other ideas going on. Pretty nifty.
 


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