Rhythm connections: tune-text alignment, syncopation, and polyrhythms

Review: Temperley's Syncopation in rock

• Running example: the Beatles "Here comes the sun".
• Here is a .wav of a crucial excerpt.

Praat work: Make a text grid, with:

1. Grid line 1 showing measures (4 count)
2. Grid line 2 showing beats (quarter notes)
3. Grid line 3 showing eighth notes

Temperley's Surface Stucture:

Temperley's Deep Structure:

Discussion point: Why is this structure "ungrammatical"?

An alternative view: polyrhythms

Polyrhythm occurs when we simultaneously divide a measure different ways.

In this blog post, Mark Liberman presents an alternative view of at least some rock music metrification in terms of polyrhythms. (Relatedly, see Temperley p. 35 on "latent triple meter").

An example: the Bo Diddley beat

• Bo Diddley: 1965
• Bo Diddley: 1955
  • Notice the maracas!

Discussion point: What is the "Bo Diddley" beat?

Roots of the Bo Diddley beat...

• 3/2 Son Clave and other Afro-Cuban Clave rhythms
• The Clave!, see also tresillo

Other related polyrhythms: habanera

From the polyrhythms blog post:

• (Argentine) tango in pop culture
  • (People dance tango in "everyday life" too, for fun, in milongas)
  • Discussion point: What is the "tango" beat?
• Habanera: Bizet's Carmen
• The Habanera rhythm as tresillo + backbeat
• Slippin' and slidin': Little Richard, 1957

Exercise: Let's gridicize Slippin' and slidin' in Praat!

And one more: candombe from Uruguay

• Candombe and djembe jam
  • Discussion point: What kind of resonators are these? Djembe vs. congo, Bass tones
• Candombe on congas, discussion of clave, hacer madera around 2:30ish
• Tango y Candombe, as couple dances

Further discussion: this piece by Liberman on polyrhythms in rap, focusing on "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.