SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  3/30/11; 1:23:20 AM Msg#:  5813 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5812/5814 Reads:  277211

Random rhythm generation iterated rapidly allows quick growth of the Rhythm Web

I find that auditioning randomly generated rhythms and recommending only the good-sounding ones to the Rhythm Web is an extremely fast way to grow the Rhythm Web database.

When a new rhythm is generated, the generation software creates all of the parameter settings that would otherwise have to be typed if I intended to only add rhythms that were already recorded in some other printed source.

A randomly generated rhythm's complete specification is ready to be submitted to the Rhythm Web, within a second or two after a random generation request is made. Accurately typing a URL can take more than a minute, so depending on random generation for new rhythms to populate the rhythm database is perhaps 30 times faster than manual entry, and is quite interesting to experience because a novel rhythm almost always results from running the process.

Even if I were to focus rhythm generation, on randomly generated 4 beat rhythms whose beats are subdivided 4 times, there are roughly four billion individual rhythm signatures that are waiting to be evaluated for that case. There is an overwhelming amount of rhythmic variation that is available to be sampled.

It does amaze me that the random generation process I use rarely produces a boring or malformed rhythm. Nearly everything that comes up is a keeper. I seem to reject only 1 rhythm out of every hundred or two that are generated.

I can usually request, audition, revise and submit two or three rhythms in a minute, using this process.

If I were able to devote an entire day to the generation of new rhythms, I suspect that I would be able to grow the number of rhythms on offer past the the high water count of 1237 chord progressions that is currently offered in The Changes. It took several years labor to surpass the goal that I set for myself of collecting at least 1200 chord progressions in The Changes.

I think we can easily grow the Rhythm Web so that tens of thousands of informatively categorized and easily accessed rhythms are recorded there.

I don't want to do that though. I want other visitors to the site to have fun also and receive credit for its construction.

Logged in members of the site who recommend rhythms, are given credit in the listings for the rhythms they contribute. Their rhythm contributions are also individually indexed under the Rhythm Web's "Rhythms By Contributor" subheading.

If a person is not logged in when they make a recommendation, the credit line generated shows that the rhythm was added anonymously.

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