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The geometry of musical rhythm: what makes a “good” rhythm good?

Article  in  Journal of Mathematics and the Arts · December 2014

DOI: 10.1080/17513472.2014.906116

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Book Review
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William A. Sethares
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Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Wisconsin Madison, WI,
USA
Published online: 22 Apr 2014.

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 Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2014.906116

BOOK REVIEW

The geometry of musical rhythm: what makes a “good”
rhythm good?, by Godfried T. Toussaint, Boca Raton, FL,
CRC Press, 2013, 365 pp., GBP £25.99 (paperback), ISBN-
13: 978-1-46651-202-3
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Figure 1 shows the tresillo in two other notations: standard
musical notation and in the necklace notation.
Toussaint generally bypasses musical notation and in-
stead emphasizes the numerical and the pictorial notations.
This makes perfect sense since the focus is on numerical

Toussaint’s Geometry presents a whirlwind tour of the
world’s rhythms: from steady pulses to the rhythms of chil-
dren’s handclaps, from popular patterns such as the 3-3-2
tresillo to the danceable Cuban clave son, from flamenco
rhythms to odd-metered Balkan folk patterns, from African
timelines to Indian tala, from the Bo Diddley beat to the
loops of electronic dance music. A variety of numerical
and geometrical methods are used to display, understand
and compare the rhythms. Measures of similarity show how
close (or far apart) the rhythms are, and these are used to
develop phylogenetic trees connecting groups of rhythms
into family trees.
Geometry is written in 38 easily digestible chapters,
each dealing with one aspect of the rhythmic puzzle. I read
one chapter a day, and the 5 weeks flew by. Each day pre-
sented a new way of thinking about rhythms and ordered
sound. Each chapter presents a new face: about the underly-
ing mathematical representations, about the algorithms that
help us organize and understand repetitive sound, and about
the various ways that rhythms and patterns are interrelated.
For a reader interested in musical rhythm, Geometry is a
great introduction to the computer science and mathemat-
ics of rhythm. For a reader interested in algorithms and
mathematical reasoning, the musical focus provides com-
pelling examples lying at the intersection of the arts and the
sciences.
and geometric properties of rhythmic patterns. Ignored are
other musical aspects such as melody, pitch and timbre.
Ignored also are the complexities of a metric hierarchy [2]
so common in the Western classical tradition. While these
omissions may be unfortunate in one sense, it is the razor
sharp focus that makes Toussaint’s Geometry so compelling
and readable. Indeed, the bulk of the book is mathemati-
cally accessible to a mature high school student, and would
make a great introduction to ideas from mathematics and
computer science for the musically inspired student. Any-
one who has ever wondered about the ‘relationship between
math and music’ will find something here.
Rhythms and algorithms
Toussaint uses Geometry in his computer science class at
New York University in Abu Dhabi, immediately following
an introductory programming class. The many algorithms
provide a wealth of motivated problems to challenge and in-
spire the budding programmer. For example, the Euclidean
algorithm may be familiar to many readers as a way of
computing the greatest common divisor of two (positive)
integers. Toussaint shows how the Euclidean algorithm can
be used to generate families of related Euclidean rhythms.
Using eight time divisions and three note onsets, the Eu-
clidean algorithm leads to the tresillo rhythm of Figure 1.

Rhythmic notations
Geometry represents rhythms in several ways. For example,
the tresillo is a rhythm that consists of three strokes per
period of repetition, two longs followed by a short. It may
be represented as

3−3−2

or, in binary notation as

10010010
where 1 represents the onset of a sound, 0 represents no
sound and each digit represents an equal span of time.
Figure 1. The tresillo rhythm may be notated as 3-3-2, in binary
form as 10010010, in musical notation as in (a), and in the necklace
notation (b). In (b), time moves around the circle in a clockwise
manner. The small open circles represent note onsets and the tiny
dots mark eight equal divisions of the period of repetition. The
circular structure emphasizes the repetitive nature of the pattern.
 2 Book review

Other choices for number of pulses and number of onsets
lead to other well-known rhythmic patterns. For example,
with 5 onsets in 16 pulses, the Euclidean rhythm is a rota-
tion of the bossa nova of Argentina. For someone unfamiliar
with the Euclidean algorithm, this is a great introduction
and wonderful way to learn about one of the world’s most
ancient algorithms. For someone familiar with the numer-
ical procedure, Euclidean rhythms present a great applica-
tion and way to ‘auditorize’ (to complement other ways to
‘visualize’) the algorithm.
Many of the world’s most popular rhythms are maxi-
mally even, where the onsets are (approximately) evenly
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and rotated versions of the clave son such as 4-3-3-4-2
(1000100100100010) and 2-4-3-3-4 (1010001001001000)
are nearly indistinguishable when considered in the context
of a repeating sequence. While perfectly clear as a statement
about binary sequences (more formally, cyclic rotations of
binary sequences), this is much more compellingly viewed
as in Figure 2 where the rotation of the rhythm is clearly
represented by the rotation of the polygon that connects the
onsets.
Figure 2 also shows several geometric properties of
rhythms from which The Geometry of Musical Rhythm
draws its name. For example, the clave son is symmet-

spaced among the pulses. In presenting this idea, Toussaint
follows a consistent and logical plan: to present the basic
idea, show some simple geometric and/or algorithmic ways
of calculating/generating sequences, and then survey a col-
lection of familiar (and not-so-familiar) rhythmic patterns
that may be derived or understood from the idea. For maxi-
mally even sequences, the method is a graphical procedure
that represents quantization of a line whose slope is deter-
mined by the number of pulses and the number of onsets.
The simplest example, with three onsets divided among
eight pulses leads to the tresillo as well as a rhythm used in
the Beijing opera, the Brazilian catarete, and a bell-pattern
from Ghana known as the nandon bawaa.
ric, most clearly visible in the mirror symmetry about the
dashed diagonal line in part (b). Many of the world’s most
popular rhythms have such axes of symmetry: the tresillo,
the clave son, the bossa nova and the Nigerian timeline
shiko are some common examples. The dotted line in (b),
together with the two sides of the polygon, forms an isosce-
les triangle. Musically, this indicates that the rhythm con-
tains two adjacent inter-onset intervals of equal duration.
This geometric property is also shared by a number of pop-
ular rhythms including the shiko and the Central African
hybrid soukous rhythm. The gahu rhythm from Ghana con-
tains two such isosceles triangles while the bossa nova has
three.

Rhythm and geometry How similar are two rhythms?

By their very nature as repetitive patterns, rhythms re- From a musical perspective, it is clear that some rhythms
peat. Thus the clave son 3-3-4-2-4 (1001001000101000) can be thought of as ‘more alike’ than others: they may

Figure 2. The clave son rhythm is represented by 5 onsets in 16 equally spaced pulses in (a). Two cyclic rotations are shown in (b) and
(c). The dashed line through (b) shows the axis of symmetry. The numbers in (c) represent the distance between onsets as measured by
the number of pulses around the circumference of the circle. The histogram in (d) shows the collection of all time intervals that occur in
the rhythm.
 Book review
Figure 3. Five flamenco rhythms are shown in this phylogenetic
tree which is based on the edit distance between the rhythms. This
is redrawn from Figure 35.4 in Toussaint’s Geometry.
be performed in similar musical styles, they may occur
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close together geographically or there may be cultural ties
between groups that prefer certain patterns over others. It
is intuitively plausible that rhythms may be ‘close together’
or ‘far apart’ based on similarities and differences in the
set of temporal intervals that define the rhythms. When two
rhythms have the same period, any reasonable metric can be
used to describe the distance between them. For example,
the Hamming distance measures how many places on the
timeline differ between two patterns. Standard metrics such
as the Euclidean 2 metric, the taxicab metric 1 or the
max-value ∞ distance may also be applied.
However, when two rhythms have different periods, ap-
plication of these metrics becomes problematic because
they require a direct comparison between elements in Zn
with elements in Zm for n = m. Toussaint explores a large
number of possible ways of measuring rhythmic distance,
including qualitative measures of symmetry (as in Fig-
ure 2(b)), measures based on all the intervals contained in
the rhythms (as shown in Figure 2(c)) and measures based
on histograms of the interval content (as in Figure 2(d)).
Toussaint also explores the swap (or ‘edit’) distance that
measures how many changes are needed to transform one
binary pattern into another.
Given a measure of rhythmic similarity, it is possible
to draw graphs that show (approximately) all the distances
between all the rhythms in a collection. Toussaint has pio-
neered the application of phylogenetic analysis to musical
rhythm. For example, Figure 3 shows the relationships be-
tween five flamenco rhythms where distance is measured
by the swap metric. The layout projects the set of all dis-
tances between all five rhythms onto two dimensions. In this
case, the fandango and guajira are centrally located while
the solea and buleria form a secondary cluster. With luck,
such clusterings may represent similarities and groupings
in the cultures that use them, in the people who perform
them or in the sound patterns themselves. Such trees were
originally conceived for the purpose of studying evolu-
tionary relationships among biological organisms and have
been successfully applied to a variety of cultural objects [4],
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to the study of the evolution of musical rhythmic patterns
[5] and musical performance styles [3], and in the structure
of musical compositions [1].
What makes a ‘good’ rhythm good?
Geometry’s subtitle asks a good question! Of course, Tou-
ssaint does not really answer this in a definitive way... but
the attempt comes tantalizingly close. Toussaint reframes
the question by asking ‘what makes the clave son so good?’
Gathering the evidence: the clave son is maximally even,
has the property of rhythmic oddity, lies in the middle of
the range of rhythmic complexity and onset complexity, is
central in the phylogenetic tree, has mirror symmetry, and
much more.
Underlying this quest for a quantification of the quality
of musical rhythm is the belief that human perceptions
follow rules, that we enjoy patterned sounds for a very good
reason (or reasons). While we may not yet know exactly
what those reason are, The Geometry of Musical Rhythm
does its best to seek out and codify the relevant parameters,
to systematize via mathematics, geometry and algorithm,
which aspects of a rhythm tend to make it pleasing and
which aspects tend to make it awkward. I do not know if
this quest is quixotic or inevitable. But whichever ultimately
is the truth, Toussaint is an excellent guide.
References
[1] J. Colannino, F. Gómez, and G.T. Toussaint, Analysis of emer-
gent beat-class sets in Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and the
Yoruba bell timeline, Perspect. New Music 47(1) (2009), pp.
111–134.
[2] F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal
Music, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983.
[3] E. Liebman, E. Ornoy, and B. Chor, A phylogenetic approach
to music performance analysis, J. New Music Res. 41(2)
(2012), pp. 215–242.
[4] C.P. Lipo, M.J. O’Brien, M. Collard, and S.J. Shennan (eds.),
Mapping Our Ancestors: Phylogenetic Approaches in An-
thropology and Prehistory, Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, NJ, 2011.
[5] G.T. Toussaint, Phylogenetic Techniques for Musical Rhythm
Analysis, Proceedings of the First International Conference
on Analytical Approaches to World Music, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 2010.
William A. Sethares
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI, USA
Email: sethares@wisc.edu
C 2014 William A. Sethares