Most Common Melodic Rhythms

[gongchime]

Have a look at figure 9 in this article we looked at before:http://www.musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Huro ... .htmlSince most melodic material clusters around the eighth note, and since every melody I analyzed both western popular and oriental folk music contain eighth notes within 2 measuresor so, we can eliminate all rhythms which do not contain eighth notes as being much more rare. With that in mind, I created a rhythm chart of the likely rhythms one would encounter in a popular melody. Some rhythm schemes analyzed have only 3 rhythmic positions occupied, most have four as I've created on the chart but may not start on the downbeat. Many popular melodic rhythms do not contain a "c" cell. A tie can be placed anywhere, effectively expanding this chart exponentially. There are more a' (read a prime) and b' in popular music than in folk music where primes are fairly nonexistant. The primes represent just a slight rhythmic variation, either with the addition of a sixteenth note somewhere or a part of the rhythm subtracted. Sometimes this is created with a tie to a repeating rhythmic cell from the previous, perhaps creating a^a' b b or a b^a' b. Green means they are the most common rhythms. They are the most common because they contain two or more pairs of eighth notes. Yellow means be careful because they only have one set of eighth notes or too many sixteenth notes. Red means there is only one set of eighth notes AND too many sixteenth notes. Blue means syncopated. Brown means ignore my scribbles.Eighth note triples and quarter note triplets occur much more frequently, for example, in Bob Marley's music but are not covered here. Another kind of syncopated rhythm that also occurs in popular music is the eighth note followed by a quarter note, folowed by another eighth note but is not covered here because it is rare enough not to warrant it. Lastly an eighth note rest followed by an eighth note is a fairly common starting rhythm especially for verses and also for classical music but is also not included because it is not likely to repeat except at the beginning of another phrase or subphrase. These rhythms can be found under my pics at www.myspace.com/gongchime on the second page of the Music Composition folder or hopefully right here: