Creating Rhythms

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 and MP3 files that you can listen to at the book's website.

If you're reading an ebook version, there are individual links to the MIDI files. There is a MIDI player for every major operating system. A good one is TiMidity.

Accompanying this book are command-line programs for doing calculations and creating rhythms. The programs are written in the C programming language, and will have to be compiled before you can use them. You do not have to know C to use the programs or understand the contents of the book. There is a C language compiler for every major operating system. A good one is gcc. There is nothing operating system specific about any of the programs, so you should have no problems compiling them on any computer.