barestides
commented
6 years ago Another concept, that may be able to be worked into the syncopation index / saturation idea, is complexity levels: Basically, the number of different time differences between impulses.
So if you have a kick drum on each beat in measure, they are all equidistant; 4 impulses, all 1 beat apart However, if we take out the kick on beat 2, we have 3 impulses, the difference between the first two is 2, but between the 2nd and third is 1. This sounds more complex / syncopated. What's also relevant is the ratio of the time differences. In this case, we have 2 differences, 1 beat and 2 beats, so a simple 1/2 ratio. This would be less complex than if we moved the kick on 3 to the 3.5 beat. In this case, we have kicks on 1 , 3.5, and 4. We have differences of 0.5 and 2.5, so a 1/5 ratio.
two concepts: syncopation index to get a feel for how syncopated different spots in a beat feel, I made some syncopation experiments in
eme-ene.sample.beatsthe idea is to end up with an index based off where a drum's notes fall in a measure 1 and 3 are less syncopated than 2 and 4, which are less syncopated than the ands, which are less than the ees, which are less than the uhhs. the question is how much more syncopated is a spot than another spot. with first impressions, notes on uhhs sound far more syncopated / difficult to predict than ees, which sound more syncopated than ands, but the difference between uhhs and ees is greater than ees and ands, which means we're not dealing with a linear graph here.saturation - given a len beats, and a granularity, of the notes available to be filled, how many are filled? so if granularity is
:q, and beat-len is 4. We have 4 available slots to place notes. If all 4 are filled, saturation is 1. If none are filled, saturation is 0. saturation = num-notes-filled / num-available-notes