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A Platonic Model of Funky Rhythms

2016; Society for Music Theory; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.30535/mto.22.2.1

1067-3040

Richard Cohn,

Neuroscience and Music Perception

Many popular and improvised musics project duple meter at multiple levels of a metric hierarchy, and superimpose upon them a series of three-unit spans that induce multi-levelled conflicts with that hierarchy. Adopting a real-time generative model from Pressing 1983, this paper attributes these metric conflicts to relations among the small numbers that underlie the meters. This model suggests a deep resemblance between funky rhythms and the acoustic relations at the core of Plato's model of musical tone. Examples of 3-generation, superimposed on cycles of 8, 16, 32, and 64 units, are examined in compositions of Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Robert and Richard Sherman, Bill Withers, and Deadmau5.