Drummers have good names for things. The clave, the tresillo, the paradiddle, the bembé bell. Each one is a handful of hits spread over a bar, and once you have heard it with its name you hear it everywhere. Pick one, hear it, see it drawn, then see if you can name them blind.
cooking · work in progressThe bar as a circle. Each drum is a ring; its hits are joined into a shape. A shape that repeats itself around the circle is a pattern that feels even; a lopsided one leans.
One of the patterns above plays with the grid hidden. Four names, one right. The tally stays in this tab and nothing is sent anywhere; the point is finding out which pairs your ear confuses.
Click any box in the grid above to add or remove a hit. Or spread a number of hits as evenly as possible over the bar and see what comes out: a surprising number of the named patterns are exactly that, the evenest way to fit k hits into n steps. That is Godfried Toussaint's observation from 2005, and the tile checks it live.
A rhythm on this page is a bar cut into equal steps, usually sixteen, and a drum either hits a step or does not. That is a coarse way to write music, and it cannot hold a flam or a drag or the push and pull of a real drummer, but it holds the skeletons, and the skeletons are what the names refer to.
The necklace. Writing a bar as a circle instead of a line was how ethnomusicologists made rhythms comparable across traditions. Join a drum's hits and you get a shape, and the shape says things the row of boxes hides: the son clave is a lopsided pentagon, the bembé bell is nearly a regular heptagon that cannot quite close, four on the floor is a square. Rotate a shape and you get the same pattern started somewhere else, which is exactly what the two claves, 3-2 and 2-3, are to each other.
Evenly spread. Ask for three hits over eight steps, as evenly as you can, and the tresillo appears. Five over eight gives the cinquillo; seven over twelve gives the bell pattern that runs through West African and Afro-Cuban music; five over sixteen, started on a different step, gives the bossa nova. Toussaint noticed that the same arithmetic that schedules pulses in a particle accelerator produces these rhythms, and the third panel lets you check him.
Swing. The second of every pair of steps is played late. At 50 the pairs are even; at 67 they fall into triplets, which is the shuffle; in between is where most swing actually lives.
The library is small and the attributions are short on purpose. Every pattern here has a long history, several names, and regional variants that a sixteen-box grid flattens; the blurb names the place the pattern is most associated with, not where it began, because most of these travelled with people who were given no say in the matter. Corrections are welcome, especially from people who play these.
Not here yet: a real drummer's timing, rudiments that need two hands to be closer than a sixteenth, and the idea this tile was partly built for, how the rhythms of pop music changed decade by decade. That last one needs a dataset of drum patterns with dates, and none is lying around; it stays a spark until one is.
Everything is synthesised in this tab: a sine that drops in pitch for the kick, filtered noise for the snare and the hat, a short high ping for the clave. No samples, no model, nothing leaves the page.