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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ต.ค. 2014
- View full lesson: ed.ted.com/lessons/a-different...
In standard notation, rhythm is indicated on a musical bar line. But there are other ways to visualize rhythm that can be more intuitive. John Varney describes the ‘wheel method’ of tracing rhythm and uses it to take us on a musical journey around the world.
Lesson by John Varney, animation by TED-Ed.
There needs to be an app where you can make beats with that circle he mentioned.
+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!
it would be impossible to write an entire song this way because you couldnt write anything longer than 1 bar. but just for giving people a new way to imagine how it works, this video is awesome.
+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?
Can we take some time to appreciate the animation and the quality knowledge provided in this video.
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
Once others recognize that this isn't being proposed as a "better" way to view rhythm, it can very easily excel as an educational tool for those of us that simply flounder when presented with the standard notation. As with all things "classical education," we need to recognize that it is not inherently the most effective way to teach things, but is instead the one that has been utilized the longest.
Thank you for sharing.
+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.
Rhythm is what I struggle with the most as a musician and composer. I tend to favor simple rhythms because I have a hard time internalizing the beat. I don't think this video solved all of my rhythmic issues, but I do think it generally gave me a better understanding of rhythm. I really appreciate this different perspective you shared with us.
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.
I dance flamenco and every time we study a new flamenco rhythm, our teacher uses a circle to make it more clear where the beats are. It definitely makes the process of understanding rhythms easier.
This is WONDERFUL.
+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.)
In Indian classical music, rhytm (taala) is traditionally visualized as cyclic!
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
I like this way of visualizing rhythms...I wish there were a drum machine app designed like this.
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.
The circle is a very interesting way to think of rhythm. Sort of like a physical metronome with your rhythms written on it
excellent, ted-ed . 3:06 and thank you for naming the chacarera !!
Amazing.
I love small intuitive visual geometric condensed simplified lessons that contain a lot of potential.
This is my style of learning.
I am impressed. A beautiful visualization, and one I have never encountered before. Thanks!
Wow. I can remember a long time ago when I first started to play. I was jamming with this dude who didn't have a feel for the groove. He would carry his fills two or three 16ths past the count and restart at the beginning of the bar. Turn a 4/4 groove into 5/4 and 9/8 and 4/4, all at random times.
But anyway I was trying to think of a way to explain to this dude (without knowing a damn thing about music and bars and timekeeping, etc...), that his fills were extending past the count, and the only way I could think in a way that made me understand what was happening in a way that I could explain to him was using this circular pattern.
Its okay to fill past the 12, but when you come back to the groove, you gotta slide in as if the groove never left.
Im confusing myself trying to think about how I explained it to him, but I know what I was talking about. Im sure we were really high at the time, so Im sure it made total sense.
40 yrs I've been dabbling in music with no inherent rhythm; when going beyond 2-beat toe tapping, i had 2 large left feet! ...but, i continue to strive to learn how to let go & let the beat in... and in 5 minutes you brought it all home... 😂😍🎵🎶 thank you! going to watch the entire lesson...
wish I'd learned this when I was six and attempting to play the violin. rhythms confused me for the longest time, and all my teacher could do was say "count it out". so helpful...
I've always done the same where I visualize rhythm back and forth, except it's so much easier than what's shown here. You just move back and forth according to the downbeats and fill in the in-betweens with divisions. The way they show here with the circular visuals are more suitable for polyrhythm, I would say.
In fact, that's what it's designed for.
imagine thinking the backbone of an entire genre was a simple 4/4 rhythm just because you can play something from that genre in the rhythm
Imagine.....
i don't know that this will help me in life, but it is nice to know and appreciate that some people's brains work differently, and they see the world in a different way. that in itself is beautiful.
a very nice and important thing about the rhythm in nature is that they are almost always irregularly regular. And I think this makes nature so special and unique. Thank you for the video.
Superb video.
For someone who knows nothing about music, like me, that explained so much. Easy to understand and intuitive.
Thanks.
Wow! This reminded me of one time that I saw a street artist with some bottles and a train. The bottles where set in the track and as the train was passing by, the music was played. It was beautiful to see the rhtyhm and how the space between the bottles in the circle could anticipate if a fast tempo was coming or a slow... well, anyway!
Thank you for doing this :)
I've been in music for decades and never thought of it like this. Very interesting concept
It took me over a decade to work it out!
Fantastic
Not only is this video very interesting, but I just thought how great of a reference it would be for constructing music cores for songs with different cultural influences, so I'm totally holding onto this one.
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 :-) .
Brilliant - a true insight and a wonderful, magical, deeper understanding of the realm of rhythm. Outstanding!!!
At certain tempos, this is exactly what a phonograph already does
but in a de-combined closed loop instead of a spiral path containing the entire mix in one groove
This truly opened my mind to thinking out of the box
Now you think in the circle
As a producer of electronic music this kind of thinking comes naturally because you are usually dealing with a loop and triggering sounds throughout the loop. I thought it was really interesting how rotating the starting point of the wheel leads to different time signatures.
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 😭
thank you so much for this! i often struggle with rhythm but this gave me a whole new way to think about it. beautifully presented and explained
so beautifully designed
Brilliant❗️as a beginner drummer I’m finding horizontal notations hard to STAY AHEAD of but the circle concept makes so much sense especially with regard to an uninterrupted flow from the instruments 👏🇦🇺✌️
Oh my goodness, I love the graphic design in this video animation, and the content was very well presented!
Yes, I love the way they did the graphics, too.
Je n'avais jamais eu un cours pédagogique aussi génial que celui ci bravo!
Wow !! That just blows my mind, what a wonderful way to interpret the rhythmic pulse of music !!!
I’m in love with the TedEd page I’m so happy I found it!!
More videos like this PLEAAASE
The way you compare rhythms, finding their common elements and their differences is really useful. The wheel does help a lot. Do you know of any resource (online or not) that would do the same thing with a larger selection of the common styles of music? A sort of encyclopedia of rhythms and styles. Thanks for any pointer!
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
Thank you! I discovered and traveled around the world with visualized beats in 5 minutes.
Thanks TED 😊. Slman from Libya.
As a drummer I actually found this to be very confusing xD
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.
Excellent idea! If you add "grid-lines" you can also now track the differences of the same beats: if you overlap the Persian "version" of Chacarera you will hear the beats don't fall exactly on the same moment. Those nuances, those delays and early arrivals are very important to the style (and they are impossible to mark prettily in sheet music).
Yes. This presents simplifications of the rhythms so that the inter-relationships can be seen more easily.
This is one of the most awesome videos I've ever watch. Good job!!!
Great visualization with really clear examples! Thanks a lot !!!
I like the visualization of rhythm as a circle. It is somehow more intuitive than an endless chain of bar lines. It's interesting how different cultures around the world share similar rhythmic patterns, too. I'd like to see a video about Eastern pitches (quarter steps, ect.) vs. the western 12 note scale.
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
I play taiko, and struggle ridiculously with reading music. We don't do much with western notation, as the music is typically taught vocally, but there are times when the group needs to work on something outside of practice where having something written is helpful - to everyone but me. This is fantastically easy for me to understand, and I could break down entire songs using your method! I absolutely love it.
Any chance you're working on a program that utilizes this?
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.
Nifty indeed! Never has the concept been presented more lucidly.
one of the best educational videos i have ever seen. Great culture tye in with music I would have never heard, and new knowledge. Superb!
this lesson is amazing!! isto é bem mais fácil de perceber do que pauta ! deveríamos criar outro sistema com base nisto
This was mind bending. This is the type of video you share with, as many of your music loving, friends as you can.
Explaining Rhythm and Polyrhythm in a beautiful way and very simple method.. Great John Varney.
Wonderful! I am thrilled - both by the logic and the graphics.
The best understanding of world rhythms I've seen ever! :-)
Thanks Jason - it's the result of about 15 years thinking on the topic.
I love this! I see music in a totally different way now!
Simply GREAT presentation and illustration. Thank you.
Eu fiquei encantado com esse Ted-Ed sobre visualizar ritmos por meio de uma viagem ao redor do mundo. 💖💖💖
the circle of beats looks like an atom with orbits and electrons, hehe
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
Ling Ling doesn't need to visualize rhythms. He just knows.
40 HOURS EVERYDAY!!
if you can play slowly, you can play it quickly
@@amelia1507 GENIUSES ARE BORN
NOT CREATED!!!!
Amaaaaazing
sacrilegious
Amazing approach and explanation! I feel so enlightened, thank you for this video :D
This is one of my favourite ted ed videos 💚
This is genius! I never thought of it like that!
"Rhythm is found everywhere"
*rhythm heaven intensifies*
What a great video, especially for people not familiar with music theory. We all thank you!
Thank you! This explanation made it all click for me. Thanks for the education.
We really need an app like this wheel :)
very interesting angle to explain rhythm
this is good for those who are still trying to discover their personal visual guide. I have already discovered mine, it kind looks like a bar graph with spaces between them that I can feel and anticipate beats with.
This is the most I have ever understood about music. Brilliant.
Amazing; this truly demystified a big component of music to me. I have been trying to mathematically understand music (oh people say it cant' be done..but was wondering where the feel-good feeling is coming from) and this wheel approach to rhythm is truly novel and helped me much.
Music is mathematics!
This is cool, but I'm confused
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.
this is the best video I saw so far, thank you
Thanks for this intellectual break-through!
Wow I never expected to find an example from my my country (Venezuela), I am talking about joropo.
+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?
This video its amazing. And it made my day listening Joropo in it 💛💙❤
This is a great presentation on visualising rythms thank you so much
Animation is so good! And also the narrator's voice.
Fascinating idea, though I feel like the omission of Japan and South Korea was a missed opportunity since both countries' flags have big circles in the middle :)
You're confusing beats with rhythm. Beats do not change except in tempo. Rhythm is what changes. It may or may not serve to emphasize beats.
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.
Wow, I'm blown away.
Excellent video and interesting means of representing rhythms.
I'm glad I watched this
While this is a great way to visualize music in an unorthodox way, there is no power better than understanding Musical Notation and sight reading.
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
this is my favourite ted-ed tbh
Great example , so eazy to understand . Thank you !
En la traducción a español: en lugar de quechua, debería estar escrito cueca, que es un ritmo andino.
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 .)
How about screwing around in FL studio?
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?
Brilliantly explained and animated.
TED-ED You really do make some wonderful gems
So this is basically a step sequencer.
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.
This is way more complicated than it needs to be. The current music notation is MUCH simpler and more effective than this, and to anyone with a bit of music theory knowledge, this is and redundant.
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.
As a non music nerd who knows nothing about beats and rhythms, , the comparison of different patterns was mind blowing
That's part of the idea - to give access to these concepts to anyone.
As a drummer, this is an interesting concept, and the same way I always wrote out polyrhythms to conceptualize it while I was still trying to learn the feel
Freeing us from the TYRANNY of the bar line. I feel liberated from the oppression of the bar! lol
if you want to visualize rhythm
become a music producer.
T-Mass Or, if you want to become a music producer, become a rhythm visualizer.... But, tom(ae)to tom(aa)to, I guess...
T-Mass Or, if you want to become a music producer, become a rhythm visualizer.... But, tom(ae)to tom(aa)to, I guess...
T-Mass I stop dreaming. I just wanna have fun.
How?
this is super cool, i have watched this video so many times to really learn about this
Future retro's revolution synthesizer was designed in a circle for this specific reason. Pretty good synth.
Is there an app for this specific visualization of music? THERE HAS TO BE ONE.
+Namyag2357 I'm working on it. At least the rhythmic aspects anyway.
+John Varney Oh wow! That's wonderful! I can't wait :D
+Namyag2357 www.factmag.com/2015/08/23/patterning-drum-machine-app-ipad/
+John Varney nice profile picture
+foljs Thanks for the link . . .
I loved all the references to various musical genres. It felt like going on a musical trip around the world. Great video.
This would be a fabulous rhythm teaching model for children - those that can tell time.
This so amazing!!!! I swear I feel lifted🤗