An idealized visual representation of the rhythms in “Belles”. The vertical axis represents the beats of the composition and the horizontal axis the time at which each note is played inside the rhythmic pattern. Each colour represents a different note in the piece.

Ever since I started visually representing microrhythms, for example in my last post about Marathon, I’ve had the idea of creating rhythms based on visuals, instead of the other way around. For this experiment, I was thinking about the full extent of the Gnawa rhythm going back and forth and overlapping with itself to create this … Read more

You’ve already seen a similar figure if you’ve read my post Marathon: Understanding Ratio Morphing. Here, I’ve added subdivisions of time from 5 to 8, but in practice they also include subdivisions of 2, 3, and 4, and we’re going to look over them relatively succinctly today.

First, how to read this graph. It’s important to know that it’s read from left to right. The leftmost boundary is the start of a measure, and the rightmost one the end of it. If you’ve ever used Guitar Pro or a similar notation software, you can easily imagine a cursor moving … Read more

The first semester of Advanced Mathematics has now ended. I’ve exhausted the rhythm topics I wanted to address, and I wanted to talk more about verticality. Today is sort of bridge between the two semesters, as what we’ll see can be applied to rhythm as well as harmony and melody: number sequences.

Divergent Series

Divergent series are sequences of numbers in which a term diverges from its starting point. This means that, with infinite iterations of the series, said term will reach ∞ or -∞. They are opposite to convergent series, the terms of which get closer and closer to … Read more