Creating Rhythms

Stefan Hollos and J. Richard Hollos

Format and pricing: Paperback (113 pages) $14.95, Kindle/pdf $9.95
ISBN: 9781887187220 (paperback), 9781887187237 (ebook)
Publication date: February 2014

This book is the result of a lifelong love of music and an obsession with patterns. The authors have for many years been exploring methods to find, create, describe and analyze patterns. They wrote this book to show how some of these methods can be used to generate rhythms. The methods can produce an almost endless variety of new rhythms along with popular traditional ones. For a lover of music what could be more wonderful than that?

The study of patterns at anything beyond a superficial level does require some mathematics. Fortunately the mathematics can be kept at a very elementary level. Anyone comfortable with a little algebra should have no trouble understanding and using these rhythm generation methods. Only the last chapter on stochastic rhythms requires a bit more than elementary mathematics. Any reader who faints at the sight of an equation should probably not buy the book.

The book has many example rhythms for which there are MIDI files that you can listen to here. If you're reading an ebook version, there are individual links to the MIDI files. There is a MIDI player for every major operating system. A good free one is TiMidity.

Accompanying this book are free command-line programs for doing calculations and creating rhythms. The programs are written in the C programming language, and will have to be compiled before you can use them. You do not have to know C to use the programs or understand the contents of the book. There is a C language compiler for every major operating system. A good one that is also free is gcc. There is nothing operating system specific about any of the programs, so you should have no problems compiling them on any computer.

About the authors

Stefan Hollos and J. Richard Hollos are physicists and electrical engineers by training, and enjoy anything related to math, physics, engineering and computing. They are brothers and business partners at Exstrom Laboratories LLC in Longmont, Colorado.

Table of Contents

• What This Book is About
• Introduction
• What is a Rhythm?
• Measured Rhythms
• Unrestricted Rhythms
• Restricted Rhythms
• Rhythm Necklaces
• Rhythms from Partitions
• de Bruijn Rhythms
• Christoffel Rhythms
• Word Combinations for Rhythm Sets
• Euclidean Rhythms
• Generalized Christoffel Words
• Christoffel Word Sequences
• Square Root of 3
• Square Root of 5
• Square Root of 17
• Golden Ratio
• Transcendental Numbers
• Natural Rhythms
• Rhythms of the Planets
• Rhythms of the Elements
• Folding Rhythms
• Stochastic Rhythms
• Appendix A: Traditional Rhythms
• Appendix B: Software
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors