Rhythm for beginners | Hacker News Reader

Rhythm for beginners

whitakerblackall.com

65 pointsalanfalcon12 comments

Some great discussion about part 1 here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326502

this blew my mind! dude mashes (piano) keyboard, plays it back, sounds as you would expect -- awful. then dude uses software to snap all notes to the nearest sisteenth and adds a boring base line. sounds awesome!

search for heading "An Experiment"

It sounded pretty bad to me. If he only mashed notes in one key it would have sounded much better.

It sounds exponentially less awful than before they were snapped. I particularly like when he adds a "1/16 Swing Heavy" rhythm to the notes.

I do agree that it would actually sound like music if he played all the notes in the same key, which you can do by following the lessons from part 1 of the same series.

You picked out the best part of the article: the clips are fun. I also liked the quantized version of random notes on a keyboard.

However, as a musician, this sort of article makes me uncomfortable. He says: "In this post, we will be discussing rhythm basics and all things related." Not exactly. He discusses rhythm basics from a certain cultural background, roughly western European mainstream music of the present day.

His discussion focuses one particular notation (whole notes, etc.), one particular tool (a sequencer), and most of all one particular musical language (mostly 4/4 with a backbeat, and typical mainstream instruments, electronic keyboard and drum kit: kick, snare, hi-hat).

Music is not limited to that which can be quantized.

His discussion of swing is primitive. He probably doesn't play jazz, though I can't say for sure.

I don't mind that he approaches from a certain place. It just makes me uncomfortable that he omits his background to the point where a beginner might mistakenly think the post is somehow universal.

So your point is that his "Rythm for beginners" article is not advanced enough?

You can also apply the same ideas to design. Oftentimes you can make a crappy design look decent by just aligning things to a grid or to each other. The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams is a good intro to the whole idea.

I've always loved the math of rhythm. I also always loved the logic of the different rythmic notations - whole notes, quarter notes, 16th notes.... So orderly.

Part I really caught my attention when it was posted a week or so ago. I've never really learned about music but it seems like a lot of programmers really like composing music. (Actually, L. Peter Deutsch famously left programming in favor of composing.)

I can't speak of it's quality yet, but the original post lead me to stumble upon: http://www.musimathics.com/

I think it's because programming and music theory are actually very similar. Both involve manipulating a set of rules creatively to make something that is satisfactory to yourself, while following conventions set by professionals that came way before you. It's really very similar.

Western music theory and programming are similar in that both are systematic concepts and can use numbers or "functions" to express them. The thing is, that description fits many things (even painting, drawing, photography, etc.), so it makes the relationship between programming and music less unique and less noteworthy.

> Actually, L. Peter Deutsch famously left programming in favor of composing.

That's interesting, because I'm actually "leaving" composing in favor of programming.

I've never heard of L. Peter Deutsch but will look him up.

Thanks!

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