Composing with Accelerating Rhythms

Nathan Ho — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:12:14 GMT

Thanks to all who checked out my album Haywire Frontier. Yesterday, I gave a remote talk for the NOTAM SuperCollider meetup on the project. The talk wasn’t recorded, but I decided to rework it into prose. This is partially for the benefit of people that missed the event, but mostly because I’m too lazy to research and write a new post wholly from scratch this month.

It’s not necessary to listen to the album to understand this post, but of course I would appreciate it.

Acceleration from notes to an entire piece

One of the earliest decisions I had to make while planning out Haywire Frontier was how to approach rhythm. I’m a huge fan of breakcore and old school ragga jungle (Venetian Snares’ work convinced me to dedicate my life to electronic music), and partially as a result of that, unpitched percussion and complex rhythms are central to a lot of my output.

However, I resolved pretty early on that I didn’t want the rhythmic material of the project to fall into the grids and time signatures of dance music. My reasons for this are nebulous and difficult to articulate, but I think a big part is that I wanted to challenge myself. When I make beat-based music, which I do frequently, I tend to think relative to established genres like drum-‘n’-bass or techno or house, and I mimic the tropes of what I want to imitate. Removing those guardrails, while still trying to make music conducive to active listening, puts me out of my comfort zone. I like to put myself in creative situations where I feel a little awkward or uncomfortable, because if there’s anything I personally fear in my creative output, it’s complacency. [1]

So beats are out. An alternative, which I have used a lot in the past, is a type of randomized rhythm I call the “i.i.d. rhythm,” or “Pwhite-into-\dur rhythm:”

SuperCollider code:

// NB: Full aggregated code from example, plus SynthDefs, are at the end of the post.
Routine({
    loop {
        s.bind { Synth(\kick) };
        rrand(0.03, 0.6).wait;
    };
}).play;

In these rhythms, the inter-onset intervals (IOIs), or time between successive hits, are chosen with a single random distribution. In statistics terms, the IOIs are i.i.d., or independently and identically distributed. The distribution is uniform in this example, but you can use log-uniform, or any distribution over the positive real numbers.

Every SuperCollider user has written one of these rhythms at some point. They’re perfectly serviceable for some applications. However, for rhythmic material that drives an entire percussion section, I have to admit that I find these tiresome and uninspiring. In one word, what these rhythms lack is phrasing.

If you were to grab a non-musician, give them a snare drum, and ask them to hit it “randomly,” their result would be nothing like this. They might produce a cluster of rapid hits, then silence, then a nearly steady rhythm, and modulate between all those approaches. That’s to say nothing of a free jazz drummer who’s spent years training to produce complex, compelling rhythms that may not fall on a grid. It’s well known to psychologists that humans are very bad at producing data that passes randomness tests; I view it as Geiger-counter-type rhythms failing to pass humanity tests.

Nathan Ho (Posts about rhythm)

Composing with Accelerating Rhythms

Acceleration from notes to an entire piece