+Sebass I'm working with a developer on it currently.

+John Varney would love to hear some updates on that

+Sebass this is essentially the way that bars are visualized in the Session View of Ableton Live 9.

+John Varney looking forward to it!

+Sebass It's called Figure!

+James Logan Often a piece has a basic underlying rhythm, which you experiment with using the wheel and then set. If you want to change the rhythm in a different section you just do a new wheel. It can also be used to get a feel for how interacting rhythms ion a piece work together.

+James Logan If you make the circle bigger you can essentially add bars

+Matt Fellenz You would just have to repeat after a certain amount of time

I hope you're joking dude *****

+MomoTheBellyDancer what would be the point in writing it in a circle if it loops the whole song then?

+Jacob Curry Thank you Jacob. You've got the picture.

@@johnvarney3750 But *you* somehow missed it. The REASON musical notation has remained largely unchanged is because it is simple and it works. You've drawn an image which can be used for ONE measure and is incapable of doing much else. Don't believe me? Show us how you write your 7-stroke rolls (open, closed, then open again). Or, show us the Purdie Shuffle; It can be approximated pretty well on a staff. Your method would require a compass, protractor, and some serious voodoo to illustrate it (or more importantly to *re-create* it). This is, after all, why musical notation exists. I love innovation, but it has to serve a purpose AND be an improvement. Sadly, this does/is neither. But, hey... cool pictures, bro.

@@robf00fbug19 That's not what it's for. It's to show how underlying elements in layered cyclic rhythms work, as in salsa, for example, and to show how you can interrelate different rhythms, such as chaconne and joropo, by their cyclic similarities. At no point does it propose itself as a replacement for western standard notation.

Thank you so much!

@@johnvarney3750 thank you. I like how you showed the effects of the rotations on the wheel. Plus, great music knowledge of world rhythms!

That’s what I was doing while watching the video

and unsurprisingly, this TED video doesnt mention that. Coincidence? I think not! It's on purpose imo.

I had heard this before. Interesting. It's amazing how much of Indian culture leans towards cyclical conceptions ... Of time, meter, the cosmos, life, the gods (in Hinduism) ...

That's exactly what I thought when I started watching this and was kind of surprised they didn't mention it.

I'm started to figure why trance is so popular in Goa.

@@AlbertBalbastreMorte lol thats easy..cause of all the people on acid! Trance hits different when you're high

There is something internal to how the brain processes sounds that makes this difficult for me too, and I have tried to listen to even beats by themselves. If the main beat marks repeating patterns for the brain to synchronize with, then having issues syncing with it is what causes the problem for me. I feel like my brain is able to speed-up and slow-down more easily while thinking, and when this happens during strumming the guitar (such as when thinking about something while playing) I usually strum and tap my foot too early and mess up the rhythm. An MRI scan will likely show synchronized signal swirls (cutting edge discoveries are currently being made there). In summary: I think this is a quirky think in the brain similar to how dyslexic people use a different part to read which is better at things but worse at others.

I think I agree with you and a lot of people have that problem. Further, The graphics in this video do not synchronize very well with what's being described, come up thus causing a little bit of a disconnect in the explanation.

+Greg Scott Absolutely. Shame it's so unknown.

***** Agreed.

+Greg Scott I agree too, but it's starting to accelerate!

oops i accidentally ruined your 666 likes

Looking forward to seeing your score of literally ANY music. (If you've only got one measure worth of music this idea isn't absolutely terrible, but it still kinda is.)

Me too!

***** Too bad it's not for Android

Cool... Though no Android love 😒... And my iPad 2 is aggravatingly slow since iOS8.

If someone made an app like that for android i would buy the shit out of it!

Thanks for the comments - there's also a theoretical component that goes with this that was a bit too complex for this brief format. I'm hoping to get together with a programmer to develop a rhythm- wheel app that would incorporate this.

I agree. Like how can we encode a change of the beat when the song progresses?

@@oshgnacknak72 You *can't* with this abysmal idea.

I pefer sightreading much more over using a system like this

Oshgnacknak A second circle :0

@@oshgnacknak72 You could draw a circle for each different pattern and place them sequencially. To know when to change patterns, you could associate a number to each circle which would represent the how many times this pattern needs to be repeated before playing the next one.

40 HOURS EVERYDAY!!

if you can play slowly, you can play it quickly

@@amelia1507 GENIUSES ARE BORN NOT CREATED!!!!

Amaaaaazing

sacrilegious

In fact, that's what it's designed for.

at least the outdated Bohr model, anyway . . .

Upvote for physics geek.

@@princeofcupspoc9073 not a real physics geek, orbiting electrons are 3 dimensional

Swear hahaha! But to any geeks around in 2018, there are no atoms! There is no material!!!

@@justanmichael5378 2019 geek right here

Imagine.....

Yes. This presents simplifications of the rhythms so that the inter-relationships can be seen more easily.

Yes, I love the way they did the graphics, too.

That's part of its strength - this video only takes it up to 8 beats, but I do workshops up to 16, and then beyond. It helps to empower musicians to create their own rhythms.

Nice. I'm going to have to look more into this method. I could very well use it for constructing music through some of the programs I have, as usually, the hardest part for me is thinking up the underlying structure to start something. Most of what I've done in the past was just playing around until I got something I liked....but that was time consuming, and took a /lot/ of trail and error, and ended up being overly repetitive with out really having a good backbone.

what cores ? there aren't many possibility to fill those gaps, and most of the music was inspired by the same source, also human brains always seek for patterns and structures. so it please us when a song is 4/4 or at least triole.

Oh, come on! Sure, there are plenty of common patterns we all know and love, but it doesn't take a lot of ingenuity to make a new rhythm. Look at +John Varney's answer above - he does workshops using up to 16 beats. There are exactly 2^16 different patterns of "present" or "absent" beats, which is 65 536 of them - and that's considering only two different levels of stress on the beats. The video already uses four different levels: main, secondary, off and none; and in 16 beats, that makes a total of 4^16 = 4 294 967 296 different possible patterns - that's right, over 4 billion! Bet you can find something new and interesting in there :-) .

That would be possible, though it would take a bit of time. What I'm more interested in is musicians harnessing the technique to construct their own complex rhythms

Now you think in the circle

It took me over a decade to work it out!

Thanks Jason - it's the result of about 15 years thinking on the topic.

rlly old comment but SAME i was like wondering, do people NOT think like this??? but yeah i forgot that its cause i deal with loops so much 😭

That's interesting. I play a lot of Middle eastern music and they don't use quarter steps - rather 3/4 steps. In Persian music they don't even acknowledge the octave as anything important - they add intervals from the tonic.

John Varney How are the 3/4 steps notated?

***** fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DA%A9%D8%B1%D9%86 fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B3%D8%B1%DB%8C_%28%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%DB%8C%D9%82%DB%8C%29

In what way?

In a way that I'm not used to this "musical notation"

It's not meant to be "notation," but a graphic representation to be able to visualise how rhythmic events interact.

Luis Gutiérrez I don’t get this at all:)

Me too.

Could you pls explain it further for me

@@story_teller4268 Look up the difference between BEAT and RHYTHM. Use more than one music dictionary to learn the difference. Failing that, enlist the assistance of a percussionist. This column is not the place for such explanations, however... Beats are subdivisions of a measure (which is also known as a bar). The top number of the time signature of a piece of music tells you how many beats are in a measure, e.g. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. The bottom number of the time signature tells you what note or rest represents a single beat. If the bottom number is a 2, then a half note or rest represents one beat. If the bottom number is a 4, then a quarter note or rest represents one beat. If the bottom number is 8, then an eighth note or rest represents one beat. Let's say that the time signature is 3 / 4, meaning 3 is the top number and 4 is the bottom. There would be 3 beats in any given measure in the music and those beats would be presented in terms of quarters. This means that any measure could have 3 quarter notes, 3 quarter rests, or a combination of notes and rests that added up numerically to 3/4. You could, for instance, use a half note followed by 2 eighth notes to make a measure of music in 3/4. No matter what combination of notes and rests comprise each measure, there would still have to be only 3 beats per measure. That is dictated by the time signature and cannot be changed unless the time signature itself is changed. No matter how rapidly or slowly the music is performed (this is called tempo), the music written in 3/4 time will still have 3 beats per measure, represented in terms of 3 quarter notes or rests or whatever other notes and rests add up to 3/4. Using note and rest values other than quarters in this example means that you must be careful of your math, but it'd be perfectly acceptable, for instance, to write everything in terms of sixteenth notes and rests, provided you didn't exceed 12 (since 12/16 = 3/4). There are special cases where music may appear to have an incorrect number of beats either at the beginning or at the end; the usual reason for this is the existence of an anacrusis (pickup), and the "incomplete" first and last bars are added together to make the correct number of beats as dictated by the time signature.

Yes, I am, but the programmers are finding it tricky. In the meantime, and in parallel, I'm develpoing a set of rhythm wheel cards that can be used in a similar way.

Music is mathematics!

+José Gouveia Not only that, but I play bass on the example, with some Colombian and a Venezuelan musician friends (arpa, cuatro & capachos)

+John Varney Furruco?

There's no furruco on it, but I have a slovenian one now, and might include it if I ever re-record it!

+John Varney Do you have any gaita rhythms?

yea but i like the visual for this one.

It may share some aspects with what you describe, but it's above all a way of interconnecting cultures and genres though their common rhythmic patterns.

Yes. One way or another you are still"plotting" the beat.

You're right! The "Cueca" is a rhythm of the Andes, while "Quechua" is the language of the Maya people of Mexico.

@@yuyiya Quechua is the language of Andean peoples from the territory of the old Inca empire

​@@EduardoGarrido2188 Glad somebody's paying attention! ;-) "Quechua is a Quechuan language with about 8 million people in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina. Quechua was the language of the Inca empire which was destroyed by the Spanish in the 16th century." (See www.omniglot.com/writing/quechua .)

This was a pretty diverse video with a hell of a lot of examples, good research!

i love doing tht!

This was my thought exactly. It's so easy to get a good sense of rhythm in FL Studio.

How so? Curious :)

so how are you going to visual rhythm when you computer is turned off? or when you are away from home?

That's part of the idea - to give access to these concepts to anyone.

Musical notation is great, but once you get out of certain genres of music you'll find proficiency falls off a lot or goes off on strange non-standardized tangents. You'll wind up with guys playing tab specialized for playing their own instrument or playing by ear. Actually, personally, for pitch I actually find visualizing a piano keyboard is much more useful for picturing intervals than sheet music.

nacoran yeah picturing a keyboard for pitch is a good idea and a wheel for the beat is also a good idea but its the stave that puts them both together along with other instructions like the key, dynamic, etc

Raptec Clawtooth Badillo True, because it has to do with the probablility of occurrence of rhythmic events.

Maybe middle school textbook bohr atoms...

+Raptec Clawtooth Badillo Atomic orbitals look nothing like this, just saying

+Raptec Clawtooth Badillo Don't mind those snobs. Nobody has ever taken a snapshot of an atom anyway. The only image we have at all is of electron density distribution, so it is said, anyway; and even the device uses a magnetic ring which, surprise, creates rings in the visuals. It's interesting that snobs are usually ignorant, isn't it?

Raptec Clawtooth Badillo true though

How? I mean, this is multimedia. The main effect, circle or bar, about this is that it is showing you physically how far apart the notes are. To do this without a computer, but to someone with some music theory (a few classes years ago in college) who does most of his recording these days staring at a screen looking at wave patterns this seems much more intuitive.

nacoran It feels more complicated for me :(

True

I think its because music notation is just more clear than this. It has the time signature, rests and the length of each note so as soon as you see it you can attempt it. With this wheel however i think trying to clap out the rhythm just by looking at it would be harder because (i find) its harder to keep an even pace in your head going around a circle

I don't think this is to replace music notation it is just showing a way to visualize the rhythm patterns and spacing.