Event overview
Computational Methods for the Analysis of African Rhythm Timelines
Godfried T. Toussaint
Faculty of Science
New York University Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates
http://nyuad.nyu.edu/academics/faculty/godfried-toussaint.html
Prof. Emeritus, McGill University
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/
ABSTRACT:
The applicability of computational-mathematical tools to the analysis of African rhythm timelines is discussed. The issue of whether African rhythm has meter is revisited from a quantitative mathematical point of view by comparing the pulse saliency hierarchies of African timelines with those of Western music. To submit rhythms to a phylogenetic analysis, a measure of similarity between rhythms is employed. Two fundamental approaches to measuring the similarity between rhythms are compared: a feature-based procedure and a superior transformation method. In the latter strategy a rhythm is represented as a binary sequence of symbols denoting onsets and rests, and a distance measure called the edit-distance is used. The edit distance between two rhythms is the minimum number of mutations required to transform one rhythm to the other, in which the mutations consist of insertions, deletions, and substitutions of onsets and rests. A phylogenetic analysis using the BioNJ algorithm from the SplitsTree-4 software package, incorporating the edit distance, applied to two collections of African timelines consisting of 34 binary 16-pulse timelines and 39 ternary 12-pulse timelines, yields new insight into the prototypical roles played by the standard bell timelines.
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Many of Prof. Toussaint's papers on computational music may be found here:
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/rhythm-and-mathematics.html
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/flamenco.html
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Aug 2012 | 3:00pm - 5:00pm |
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