SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  3/27/11; 2:25:26 AM Msg#:  5807 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5806/5808 Reads:  108808

What does 1100-000-0011-0010-011-011-0011-0000 sound like?

Click here to find out.

But actually, you can tell a lot about the rhythm that's specified there just looking at that one-and-zero-y notation.

The rhythm is an 8-beat cycle. You can tell by counting the groups between the dashes.

If you count to 8 along with the click track that accompanies the rhythm performance, you'll hear the rhythm idea restart again on the next beat. Since that's a restart, you should start counting up from 1 again as the cycle starts up again.

The loop starts with a double hit that begins with the first beat of the rhythm cycle.

There are double hits, four of them, and even a single hit later on, but those all start in the middle of a beat and never wrap around to cover the start of the next beat. We can tell that hits start in the middle of beats in every beat but the first, because each group after the first starts with a 0.

So we know that we'll feel like we're tripping along in the later part of the rhythm and then regain our footing and hit our marks perfectly precisely as the rhythm restarts.

On beat 2 and beat 8, we're not supposed to hit at all.

We start out dividing the beat by 4 on the early beats, but we divide by 3 on beats 5 and 6, which gives us the impression that the rhythm flow is slowing down there. We move back to subdivision by 4 in beat 7, which gives us a sense of accelerating that will help us jump back onto the beat, when 1 comes around.

This string specifies a rhythm sound and we can figure out a lot about what we'll hear if we perform the rhythm by just paying a tiny bit of attention.

Usually, a string of 1s and 0s is just noise that has no meaning in itself. My eyes glaze when I see something like that. I usually find that something of this size, I can't memorize.

Interpreted as a sound, it means something, so I bet I'd have a much better shot at memorizing it.

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