Beats and scales

I don’t know a lot about Afro-Caribbean rhythms, beyond the fact that they cause me intense joy whenever I hear them. My formal music education has focused almost exclusively on harmony, and I’ve had to learn about rhythm mostly on my own. That’s why it was so exciting for me to discover the work of Godfried Toussaint. He introduced me to a startlingly useful pedagogical tool: the rhythm necklace.

Rhythm necklaces with their shadows

A rhythm necklace is a circular notation for rhythm. Let’s say your rhythm is in 12/8 time. That means that each cycle of the rhythm has twelve slots where sounds can go, and each slot is an eighth note long (which is not very long.) A 12/8 rhythm necklace is like a circular ice cube tray that holds twelve ice cubes.

What’s so great about writing rhythms this way? Rhythms are relationships between events that are non-adjacent in time. When you write your rhythms from left to right, as is conventional, it’s hard to make out the relationships. On the circle, the symmetries and patterns jump right out at you. I recommend the Toussaint-inspired Rhythm Necklace app to get these concepts under your fingers and into your ears.

You can’t look into Afro-Caribbean beats without coming across a bell pattern called Bembé, also known as “the standard pattern” or the “short bell pattern.” Here’s how it sounds:

I was probably first exposed to Bembé by Santana’s “Incident at Neshabur.”

Bembé’s meter is ambivalent. You can represent it as duple (4/4) or triple (6/8 or 12/8). Practitioners urge you not to think of the bell pattern as being in one meter or the other. Instead, you’re supposed to hold both of them in your head at the same time. The ambiguity is the point.

Two representations of Bembé

Continue reading