Euclidean rhythms
The Euclidean Rhythm in music was discovered by Godfried Toussaint in 2004 and is described in a 2005 paper "The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms". The greatest common divisor of two numbers is used rhythmically giving the number of beats and silences, generating the majority of important World Music rhythms.
Do it yourself
You can play with a slightly generalized version of euclidean rhythms in your browser using a p5js based sketch I made to test my understanding of the algorithms involved. If it doesn't work in your preferred browser, retry with google chrome.
The code
The code may still evolve in the future. There are some possibilities not explored yet (e.g. using ternary number systems instead of binary to drive 3 sounds per circle). You can download the full code for the p5js sketch on github.
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| screenshot of the p5js sketch running. click the image to enlarge |
The theory
So what does it do and how does it work? Each wheel contains a number of smaller circles. Each small circle represents a beat. With the length slider you decide how many beats are present on a wheel.
Some beats are colored dark gray (these can be seen as strong beats), whereas other beats are colored white (weak beats). To strong and weak beats one can assign a different instrument. The target pattern length decides how many weak beats exist between the strong beats. Of course it's not always possible to honor this request: in a cycle with a length of 5 beats and a target pattern length of 3 beats (left wheel in the screenshot) we will have a phrase of 3 beats that conforms to the target pattern length, and a phrase consisting of the 2 remaining beats that make a "best effort" to comply to the target pattern length.
Technically this is accomplished by running Euclid's algorithm. This algorithm is normally used to calculate the greatest common divisor between two numbers, but here we are mostly interesting in the intermediate results of the algorithm. In Euclid's algorithm, to calculate the greatest common divisor between an integer m and a smaller integer n, the smaller number n is repeatedly subtracted from the greater
until the greater is zero or becomes smaller than the smaller, in which case it is called the remainder. This
remainder is then repeatedly subtracted from the smaller number to obtain a new remainder. This process
is continued until the remainder is zero. When that happens, the corresponding smaller number is the greatest common divisor between the original two numbers n and m.
Let's try it out on the situation of the left wheel in the screenshot. The greater number m is 5 (length) and the smaller number n is 3 (target pattern length). Now the recipe says to repeatedly subtract 3 from 5 until you get something smaller than 3. We can do this exactly once:
5 - (1).3 = 2
We can rewrite this as:
5 = (1).3 + 2
This we can interpret as: the cycle of 5 beats is to be decomposed as 1 phrase with 3 beats, followed by a phrase with 2 beats (the remainder). Each phrase consists of a single strong beat followed by all weak beats. In a symbolic representation easier read by musicians one might write: x..x. (In the notation of the previous part of this article one could also write 10010).
Euclid's algorithm doesn't stop here. Now we have to repeatedly subtract the remainder 2 from the smaller number 3:
3 = (1).2 + 1
This in turn can be read as: the phrase of 3 beats can be further decomposed as 1 phrase of 2 beats followed by a phrase consisting of 1 beat. In a symbolic representation: x.x Euclid continues:
2 = (2).1 + 0
The phrase of two beats can be represented symbolically as: xx. We've reached remainder 0 and Euclid stops: apparently the greatest common divisor between 5 and 3 is 1.
Now it's time to realize what we really did:
- We decomposed a phrase of 5 beats in a phrase of 3 beats and a phrase of 2 beats making a rhythm x..x.
- Then we further decomposed the phrase of 3 beats into a phrase of 2 beats followed by a phrase of 1 beat.
- We can substitute this refined 3 beat phrase in our original rhythm of 5 = 3+2 beats to get a rhythm consisting of 5 = (2 + 1) + 2 beats: x.xx.
- I hope it's clear by now that by choosing how long to continue using Euclid's algorithm, we can decide how fine-grained we want our rhythms to become.
- This is where the max pattern length slider comes into play.
