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Geometric Properties of Musical Rhythms

Perouz Taslakian∗ Godfried T. Toussaint† ∗

Abstract. In this paper we study some geometric will be omitted in this abstract.
properties of musical rhythms. In particular, we de- Theorem 1 The complement of a Euclidean rhythm
fine two rhythm operations: the complement and the is Euclidean.
shadow of a rhythm, and show some of their prop-
erties. In the last section, we give a brief survey of It is shown in [5] that maximally even rhythms are
the problem of reconstructing rhythms given infor- Euclidean. Therefore, the complement of a maxi-
mation about their time intervals. mally even rhythm is maximally even.
Theorem 2 The complement of an Erdős-deep
1 Introduction. A musical rhythm can be repre- rhythm with n pulses and k onsets is Erdős-deep if
sented as a binary string, where each 1-bit represents and only if ⌈n/2⌉ − 1 ≤ k ≤ ⌊n/2⌋ + 1.
an onset of the rhythm and each 0-bit represents a si- Theorem 3 The complement of a Euclidean rhythm
lence [15]. Another representation of rhythms is that with n pulses and k onsets is Erdős-deep if k and n
of cyclic polygons. A cyclic polygon is a polygon are relatively prime and k ≥ ⌈n/2⌉ − 1.
inscribed in a circle. Let C be a circle with n points
placed at equal distances around its circumference.
A subset k ≤ n of these points is the set of onsets 3 Shadow Rhythms. Several ethnomusicologists
of a rhythm with n pulses. If we draw a straight have argued that African drumming, handclapping,
line between each pair of onset points consecutive and mallet performance is best understood as a mo-
around the cirle in some direction, the result will be tor activity. For example a hand (arm) is raised and
a polygon inscribed in C. We say that a rhythm with then dropped to strike the instrument. According to
n pulses and k onsets is maximally even if the sum Jay Rahn [13], one possible mechanism for the tacit
of pairwise Euclidean distances between onsets on motor mediation of attack points of notes (onsets) is
the circle is maximized. A Euclidean rhythm with n the peaking of the gesture at the temporal midpoint
pulses and k onsets is a maximally even rhythm that between two sounds. He calls the sequence of mid-
can be generated by the EU CLIDEAN algorithm points of the onsets of a rhythm the shadow of the
described in [5]. A rhythm is Erdős-deep if every rhythm. A new rhythm created from this shadow will
geodesic distance that appears between pairs of on- be called here a shadow rhythm. For example the
sets has a unique number of occurrences. Cuban tresillo rhythm given by [× · · × · · × · ] has
the shadow [ · · · × · · · · · × · · · · × · ], which
yields the shadow rhythm [× · · · · · × · · · · ×
2 Complementary Rhythms. Given a set A of n · · · · ] (Figure 1).
elements, and a subset of A, say A∗ , the comple- A fundamental concept that has
ment of A∗ is the set consisting of elements of A received a great deal of attention
not in A∗ . The study of the complementary sets of in music theory is that of maxi-
sets of intervals in the context of pitch (scales and mally even sets [3]. The shadow
chords) has received a lot of attention in music the- operation performed on a rhythm
ory [7, 2, 11]. Rhythm, on the other hand, has been increases the evenness of the new
explored little from its complementarity aspects. A rhythm. Therefore it is worth- Figure 1: The
notable exception is the work of Jay Rahn [13]. Con- while understanding the proper- Cuban tresillo and
sider the Cuban cinquillo rhythm given by [× · ×× · ties of the shadow operation. One its shadow.
×× · ]. Its complementary rhythm is [ · × · · × · · question that comes to mind is: what happens when
×], which is a rotation of the famous Cuban tresillo we continue to perform this operation on a rhythm?
rhythm given by [× · · × · · × · ]. Complementary Does it eventually become a regular rhythm? It turns
sets have many applications such as the composition out that this is a geometric problem that has been in-
of rhythmic complementary canons [16]. Here we vestigated in the mathematics literature.
study some new geometric properties of the comple- The study of properties of sequences of polygons
mentation operation on cyclic rhythms. In what fol- generated by performing iterative processes on an
lows, we present three theorems, the proofs of which initial polygon P 0 has received much attention, and
∗ the shadow operation is just one of many operations
School of Computer Science, McGill University, {perouz,
godfried}@cs.mcgill.ca that has been investigated. Perhaps the most studied

Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and sequence is the one sometimes referred to as Kasner
Technology, The Schulich School of Music, McGill University polygons [14]. Given a polygon P 0 , the Kasner de-
scendant P 1 of P 0 is obtained by placing the vertices inherent problem in uniquely reconstructing a rhyth-
of P 1 at the midpoints of the edges of P 0 . More on mic pattern from its multiset of distances.
0 0
Kasner polygons can be found in [4, 1]. 11
1
1 11 1 1
2
Coming back to the shadow operation, let 10
6
2 10
3
2
3
P 0 , P 1 , P 2 , . . . be a sequence of cyclic polygons 9 5 4 3 9
5 6 3

such that the vertex set of P i is the shadow of the 8 2 4 8 4


4
vertex set of P i−1 for all integers i ≥ 0. We say 7
6
5 7
6
5
that P i is the shadow polygon of P i−1 . Hitt and Figure 2: Two rhythms with the same interval content
Zhang [6] show that given any convex cyclic poly- that are neither rotations nor mirror images of each other.
gon P 0 , its shadow sequence converges to a regular
polygon. From their proof, it follows that the area of A natural question to ask about cyclic polygons is
each P i is greater than or equal to the area of P i−1 whether one can construct them given only the edge
lengths. The difficulty of the problem is in finding
for any i > 0, with equality only when P i is reg-
the radius of the circle in which the polygon is in-
ular. Thus, since no two polygons in the sequence
scribed. In [9], Macnab describes a method to cre-
P 0 , P 1 , P 2 , . . . have the same area except when both ate such a polygon; however his heuristic contains a
are regular, we can make the following observation: flaw. Pinelis [12] gives a simple counterexample to
Observation 4 The shadow of a rhythm R cannot be Macnab’s heuristic with only three edge lenghs, and
a rotation of R unless R is a regular polygon. provides a fix. In the long version of this paper, we
In general however, we want to represent a rhythm give an extended survey of the topic of reconstruct-
R as a polygon inscribed in a circular lattice, with the ing rhythms from interval content, show connections
vertices of the polygon lying on the equally spaced to music theory, and pose various open problems.
lattice points. Let R be a rhythm represented as a
polygon inscribed in a circular lattice of n points and References.
[1] F. Bachmann and E. Schmidt. N-gons. University of
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2nd edition.
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Wood. The distance geometry of music. Submitted, 2006.
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However, the converse is not necessarily so. The Brazilian, and Cuban clave rhythms. In Proceedings
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and Science, pages 157–168, Towson University, Towson,
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