What Is The Word For The Fixed, Repeated Cycles Of Rhythmic Pulses In North Indian Music?

One of the best discoveries I made while researching the Groove Pizza is the mathematician Godfried Toussaint. While the bookshelves groan with mathematical analyses of Western harmony, Toussaint is the rare scholar who uses the same tools to empathise Afro-Cuban rhythms. He'south especially interested in the rhythm known to Latin musicians as 3-2 son clave, to Ghanaians equally the kpanlogo bell pattern, and to stone musicians as the Bo Diddley vanquish. Toussaint calls it "The Rhythm that Conquered the World" in his paper of the aforementioned proper noun. Here it is equally programmed past me on a drum machine:

The image behind the SoundCloud role player is my preferred round notation for son clave. Hither are eight more conventional representations as rendered by Toussaint:

Son clave probably traveled from West Africa to Republic of cuba with the slave trade. Information technology may have arrived in its nowadays form, or it could have evolved from a similar 12/8 pattern called fume-fume. It has a long history–I was delighted to learn from Toussaint that son clave appears under the name "al-thaqil al-awwal" in the Kitāb al-Adwār, a manuscript written in Baghdad in the middle of the Thirteenth Century by the music scholar Safi al-Din al-Urmawi. The whole book is extraordinarily beautiful; click through the image beneath to see many more than.

There's no way to know how old son clave is, just I would judge that it'southward probably very ancient. A xl-thousand-year-old bone flute was found in Germany that plays the major pentatonic calibration. Rhythm is probably vastly older than harmony, and for all we know, hominids were chipping away at their stone axes to a son clave beat millions of years ago.

Wherever son clave came from, information technology's incredibly popular. Toussaint observes that the trounce "is heard in all corners of the world, in almost any type of music, including rhythm and blues, salsa, rockabilly, rock, soukous, jazz, house, and the fusion popular music of scores of countries." So what makes this rhythm so special? Toussaint has a series of intriguing mathematical explanations.

By and large, people prefer rhythms that are "maximally even," meaning that they're spaced more than or less equally in time. Son clave is one of many widely-used beats consisting of five hits per sixteen-step cycle (i mensurate four/4 time counted in sixteenth notes, or 2 measures counted in eighth notes.) Call back of the xvi steps as sixteen cubbyholes, each of which can hold one "object," that is, one drum hit. 16 doesn't divide by five evenly, and so in that location are several different possible means to distribute the five hits amongst the 16 cubbyholes to brand a maximally even crush. Toussaint lists them all, and labels the ones that are in common usage.

Several of these rhythms are rotations of each other, similar different modes of the same scale. Rhythms v and xi are "modes" of son clave; rhythms i, 9, 15, and 16 are "modes" of bossa nova; and rhythm 3 is a "mode" of the rumba. Cool!

Toussaint asks why this combination of v beats distributed across a sixteen-step bike should be so popular:

Why not 11 [beats], xiii, or seventeen for case? And what is it that is so atypical about five onsets? Why non 4, six, or nine? These two numbers, the number of pulses in the cycle of a timeline, and the number of these pulses that are sounded, vary widely amid different cultures around the world. It is quite common for the number of pulses in the cycle to be as fiddling as four. In Bulgarian music it may get every bit high as 33, and in the talas of Indian classical art music information technology may be equally long equally 128. The answers to these questions are substantially physiological and psychological; they lie to a large extent in the nature of the mental and physical constraints imposed by the human encephalon and body. Fundamentally, to be popular a rhythm should not be so complex that it becomes difficult to grasp by the masses, and at the same time it should not be and then simple that it quickly becomes boring. Furthermore, to serve well as a timeline for dancing, its realization should not take much more than about two seconds, the duration of our conscious sense of the nowadays. Rhythms with an even number of pulses that is likewise a power of two are, for nigh people of the world, easier to digest than other rhythms. These constraints are already sufficient to bring the workable number of pulses down to small values that are powers of two, such every bit eight or xvi. As for the number of onsets, for a timeline to afford a rich enough structure, five appears to be a good choice. However, a cycle of viii pulses does non provide enough room (in the sense of fourth dimension) for 5 onsets to be distributed so equally to create interesting patterns. Thus we are left with sixteen pulses and five onsets as the most viable candidates for creating a timeline that has a sufficiently rich structure.

Why, so, out of the sixteen patterns above, is son clave so much more than popular than the others? Toussaint attributes information technology to son clave's "rhythmic oddity," meaning that there are no pairs of hits located directly across from each other across the circle. If in that location were, the pair would tend to separate the pattern in one-half, making yous hear 2 simpler eight-stride patterns rather than one more complex sixteen-step blueprint. Because of its oddness, son clave tin can't exist broken down into smaller symmetrical pieces.

Okay, so son clave has desirable rhythmic oddity. But and then practise many other beats. What else does son clave have? Toussaint points to some special symmetries hidden in the beat. Any rhythm comes with a "shadow rhythm" with an implicit hit in between each of the bodily ones. When you're drumming, your hands or sticks reach their maximum height at the onsets of the shadow rhythm, so while you may non hear it, you lot feel it, and both you and your listeners can see it.

So far I've been talking exclusively most the then-chosen "iii-side" version of the clave. There's as well the "two-side" version, where the two-hit pattern comes first, followed past the three-hit pattern. You tin can switch from ane to the other by moving the downbeat from the top of the circle to the bottom. You might detect that the shadow rhythm of three-side clave bears a potent resemblance to ii-side clave, and conversely, the shadow rhythm of two-side clave resembles iii-side. (Thanks to Roberto Thais for this ascertainment.)

So here's where it gets interesting. We tend to hear rhythms as patterns of brusk-long time intervals, rather than perceiving the length of the fourth dimension intervals straight. Toussaint calls the pattern of long and short intervals the "rhythmic contour." Son clave and smoke-smoke feel similar "the aforementioned" rhythm because they have the same rhythmic contour, even though they're in two different time signatures.

So here'south the magic: if you lot have son clave'south "shadow" and rotate it 180 degrees effectually the circle, it has the same rhythmic profile as son clave itself. In other words, son clave sounds "the same" equally its ain shadow backwards. Information technology's the just one of the xvi-step rhythms listed higher up to accept this property. Nosotros might not be able to perceive this scrap of symmetry consciously, just it must act on the states somehow or we wouldn't exist then wild almost the beat.

Son clave shares its special qualities with all of its own rotations, the beats you get treating each of the 5 onset as the downbeat. And so why do we prefer the downbeat that we do? Toussaint thinks information technology has to do with son clave'southward metrical ambivalence. Those first three hits strongly imply triple meter, which is at odds with the underlying 4/4. The concluding two hits confirm the iv/four feeling, but without hitting the 2nd downbeat, the ane at the bottom of the circle. Yous, the listener, have to involve your musical intelligence to make sense of all this ambiguity. It'southward this invitation to your ain imaginative participation in the beat that ultimately makes son clave then much more pop than all of its close rhythmic cousins. Math! Who says it has to be boring?

Source: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2013/why-is-son-clave-so-awesome/

Posted by: bowmanbettantil.blogspot.com

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