Rhythm space

I’m working with Jamie Forth on ideas around spaces of rhythm. Here’s a demo (which might not work in feed readers):

The space has two quality dimensions, “intensity” (X) and “disorder” (Y). Drum patterns are arranged along these dimensions, so more intense ones are towards the left and more ordered ones towards the top.

Draw a line from a high hat to a kick drum. If you draw a short line the rhythms will be more homogenous. Certain angles have certain feels to them. Maybe. It seems a nice way of playing with polymetric rhythms as vectors anyway.

The demo by the way is coded in haxe and compiled to flash. The source code is here.

10 Comments

  1. Nice!

    Could polyrhytms (irrational rhytms) fit into this? Perhaps a “snap to grid” functionality that you can turn of if you want more “non western” rhytms? Just a suggestion.. 🙂

  2. Yes, good thought! Pattern duration could be an extra dimension, allowing you to mix and match patterns of different durations. Or you could make a pattern out of pulses out of different lengths, and arrange all the possible polyrhythmic patterns along a single dimension.

  3. No workee in Firefox 2.0.0.13 / Ubuntu 7.10 / Flash v9.0.115.0 (debug, but that shouldn’t matter)… All I see is a black screen.

  4. Strange, that’s about the same as me, although I have an earlier flash (9.0.48.0.2). I’ll do some more testing…

  5. Same here, nothing. I get a black box, I draw a red line on it, and that is it.

    Firefox 3 beta 4, Windows XP, Flash 9.

  6. “””
    jQuery is not defined
    [Break on this error] jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    contact-form-7.js (line 1)
    “””

  7. Yeah, same for me. Black box where I can draw a red line, but no sound.

    FireBug says jQuery is not defined.

  8. The flash applet works once I post a comment.

    Nifty! Now I just want to be able to download these beats into a tracker or something so I can actually layer stuff on top of them.

  9. Same here, a black box and a red line but no sound on FF3b5, latest Flash 9

  10. first: Well it works perfectly in Safari (3.1.1) on mac os leapard.

    second: this is truly great stuff! I love it. if you could hook a sampler onto this with all kind of sounds… unlimited possibilities..

    I wonder if you know about the multi-touch screens a lot of peaple are working on. It woud be a great way for people to make music together… with just drawing lines!

    see: http://gizmodo.com/391103/full+screen-multitouch-mac-os-x-is-here

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *