POLYRHYTHMS

 INTRODUCTION

If you are familiar with music, you know where this is going. This post will not be purely coding per se, but a mixture of how beautiful the bond of math with music is.

I love music, I love music theory but guess what music theory has, mathematics, and I love both of them.

So what does it have to do with today's topic you might ask? Well you are in for a treat.

POLYRHYTHMS

Polyrhythms is a topic which music nerds, or people who just began music theory(like me) talk about all the time to look and sound cool.

I got introduced to polyrhythms when I watched jacob collier , adam neely and andrew huang doing cool stuff with it, and their explanation of polyrhythms are just top notch.

Anyway, let us see what polyrhythms actually are and why is it so cool.

" Polyrhythms are a combination of two or more rhythms which follow the same basic pulse reference"

Let's take an example, imagine there's a chime playing once every three beats, and a string playing once every two beats. They start playing together and if you know math, the pattern should start repeating after 6 beats which is the LCM of the two numbers. Here's a sample below:

This polyrhythm is called a 2:3 polyrhythm, meaning, every three beats, 2 different beats are being played.

Here's what a 3:4 polyrhythm sounds like

And this is how a 7:11 polyrhythm sounds like,(haha 7:11, like the fast food joint, I'm so funny haha):

This does not necessarily sound pleasing to the ears but, this is widely used in the industry often, we just don't realize or recognize it.

But how do you count polyrhythms, well there's an easy trick for that.

Lets say you wanna do a 3:5 polyrhythm, we draw 15 circles numbered from 0 - 14 (if you know how to count properly, that's actually 15 circles surprisingly).

We color the 0th circle as both blue and green and give blue color to every 5th circle and a green color to every 3rd circle.

By doing this we get a repeating pattern every 15 circles.

Just for context, ill play a chime every 5th beat and a string every 3rd beat. With a hi-hat metronome in the background to represent these circles.

And you just counted a 3:5 polyrhythm, you are a cool person now, you should really be proud of yourself. I sure am proud of you though.

Let's do one for a 5:7 polyrhythm. You know the drill, 35 ( 5 * 7) circles numbered 0-34. Green color every 7 beat, and a blue color every 5th beat, I have provided an audio for context too.

If you are at a vacation somewhere, or waiting in a long queue, you could practise doing polyrhythms, it might increase your pre-exisiting frustration and irritation but hey, it's a good way to pass your time.

Try doing a 1:2:3:4:5 polyrhythm on your fingers, I don't know if this would test your mathematical brain or your perception of music, but I am pretty sure it is a good way of testing your sanity. 

WHY THOUGH?

Well this is a really deep question I ask myself everyday, but when it comes to polyrhythms, you can find it everywhere.

Polyrhythms could sometimes be a combination of complex rhythms, musicians sometimes use polyrhythms in their works to bring out some freshness, some curiosity in their music.

Math rock is a genre of music which uses weird and crazy time signatures which are partly or completely based on complex polyrhythms. 

Of course, I feel like there's a psychological aspect in it too. We are humans and we tend to find order everywhere we go. If you go to a concert or just generally hear music per se, you might find yourself bopping yourself to the beat of the music you are listening to, now that's just your brain's way of perceiving or understanding music.

Sometimes, quirky musicians induce complex polyrhythms in their music, so that they could test their audience's perception of music by the way they vibe or bop with the music, this could also be done to improve your music so that it's made for your audience and listeners.

Anyway, I could go on for hours when it comes to music, but I'll stop here for now.

Thank you for reading this blog and I hope you got to know something new!!

Also, merry christmas  and a happy new year!