What This Book is About

This book is about creating rhythms via a mathematical approach that uses combinatorics, de Bruijn sequences, Christoffel words, paper folding, and probability. We don't expect the reader to know what any of these terms mean. They are all explained in the book.

The methods discussed in the book can be used to produce an almost endless variety of new rhythms, as well as popular traditional ones.

Other than the last chapter on stochastic rhythms, the mathematics used is at a very elementary level. If you're comfortable with a little bit of algebra and you know for example that 4! = 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 = 24 then you should have no problem.

On the book's website abrazol.com/books/rhythm1/
you will find 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.

The book contains many rhythms, and those that refer to the book's website have MIDI files associated with them that you can listen to. You can go to the website and listen to all the rhythms, or if you're reading an ebook version, then there are individual links to the MIDI files. There is a midi player for every major operating system. A good free one is TiMidity.

May you create beautiful rhythms.

Stefan Hollos and Richard Hollos
Exstrom Laboratories LLC
Longmont, Colorado
Feb 21, 2014