Creating Rhythms - Softcover

This book is the result of a lifelong love of music and an obsession with patterns. The authors have for many years been exploring methods to find, create, describe and analyze patterns. They wrote this book to show how some of these methods can be used to generate rhythms. The methods can produce an almost endless variety of new rhythms along with popular traditional ones. For a lover of music what could be more wonderful than that?

The study of patterns at anything beyond a superficial level does require some mathematics. Fortunately the mathematics can be kept at a very elementary level. Anyone comfortable with a little algebra should have no trouble understanding and using these rhythm generation methods. Only the last chapter on stochastic rhythms requires a bit more than elementary mathematics. Any reader who faints at the sight of an equation should probably not buy the book.

The book has many example rhythms for which there are MIDI files that you can listen to on the book's website: abrazol.com/books/rhythm1/. There you can also find free software for generating rhythms, doing calculations,and creating MIDI files.

What if you could generate pleasant rhythms never before heard? The methods discussed in this book can be used to produce an almost endless variety of new rhythms, and in the process, traditional ones are also found to pop up. This book is about creating rhythms via a mathematical approach that uses combinatorics, de Bruijn sequences, Christoffel words, paper folding, and probability. We don't expect the reader to know what any of these terms mean. They are all explained in the book. Other than the last chapter on stochastic rhythms, the mathematics used is at a very elementary level. If you're comfortable with a little bit of algebra and you know for example that 4! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 = 24 then you should have no problem. The book contains many rhythms, with MIDI files you can listen to at the book's website: abrazol.com/books/rhythm1/ Accompanying this book are free command-line programs for doing calculations and creating rhythms which you can download from the book's website.