Darwin thought our ancestors used music as a means of courtship before the invention of language. Other experts have suggested that humming and stomping whipped early man into a communal "battle trance." Whatever the case, rhythm has been part of the human experience for as long as there's been a human experience. This app is meant to put you back in touch with that evolutionary birthright.
Rhythm Necklace is a simple toy for exploring complex rhythms. It's built around an alternate form of notation called a "rhythm necklace," in which musical patterns are represented in circular form. The advantage of the circle is that it lets you see rhythm as a series of shapes. Imagine a sped-up clock that played a kick drum whenever the second hand passed the 12, the 3, the 6, and the 9. The diamond contained within these points would reflect the steady thump of the music. Skew the shape and you change the beat.
Rhythm necklaces have been used in fields like radio astronomy and nuclear physics to visualize repeating patterns, but they've been most widely used in ethnomusicology. NYU computer scientist Godfried Toussaint uses them extensively in his book The Geometry of Musical Rhythm, which shows how music from disparate cultures is built around surprisingly similar geometric patterns.
Inspired by Toussaint's work, the $3 iPhone app is meant to let people create and explore complex rhythms on their own. It was created by Meara O'Reilly, an artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and Sam Tarakajian, a designer interested in musical interfaces. With it, you can combine up to four rhythm necklaces of your own sequencing, using simple features to modify the shapes and build patterns algorithmically. It won't unlock the cosmic mysteries of music or make you a dance floor god, but it's interesting for what it is: a simple, intuitive tool for building up polyrhythms and taking them apart, layer by layer.
Complex rhythms can seem impenetrable, but as O'Reilly points out, humans engage with them every day. Consider how effortlessly you're able to walk and talk at the same time. Or how, if you walk up to a drum circle, it isn't especially hard to tap out a pattern that gels with the beat. Still, we don't have great tools for thinking about rhythm. Standard western music notation lets you easily track melody---just follow the notes up and down the staff---but it hides rhythm behind a layer of symbolic abstraction. As Toussaint told me, "Standard Western musical notation is not user-friendly."
That's where the shapes of the rhythm necklace become especially useful. "Imagining the sounds of a polyrhythm can be really hard," Tarakajian says. But if you represent one pattern as a square and another as a pentagon, it's easy to layer the two and get a sense of how the patterns interact. This geometrical visual aspect "helps people 'see' and hear rhythms more intensely in completely new and different ways," Toussaint explains.
O'Reilly is especially interested in how we perceive these complex rhythms. The most fun part of the app is hearing the surprising grooves that can emerge from relatively simple patterns. "How something looks on the screen versus how it sounds can be very different," O'Reilly says. "When you're able to break it down one necklace at a time, you're able to see behind the curtain of what you brain is doing a little bit. I think that's incredibly powerful."
Even if you're not interested in the perceptual quirks of polyrhythms, the app proves a much simpler point: New interfaces can give us new ways of experiencing music. Without explaining it directly, Rhythm Necklace offers an accessible entry point to exploring the connection between rhythm and geometry, music and math. The designers say they deliberately avoided relying on standard music theory stuff---notes, scales, familiar shapes and symbols---and the app is much more compelling as a result. Tarakajian might've been mixing his metaphors when he said the goal is to let people "approach music with fresh eyes," but in this case that description is perfectly apt.
