A Platonic Model of Funky Rhythms, or How to Get That Swing - Richard Cohn

Plato's "Republic" reconciled the powers of 2 and 3, acoustically manifest as octaves and fifths. An analogous reconciliation is characteristic of African-diasporic repertories, where chains of dotted rhythms threaten to rupture a duply generated metric frame. Based on insights of the late Australian theorist Jeff Pressing, this presentation illustrates with examples from ragtime, samba, jazz, funk, and film music.
ABOUT RICHARD COHN:
Richard Cohn is Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. He is author of "Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad's Second Nature" (Oxford, 2012). Two of his scholarly articles have earned the Society of Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award. Cohn is series editor of Oxford University Press's Studies in Music Theory, and was recently appointed Editor of the "Journal of Music Theory". His current research models metric states and syntaxes in classical and world-music repertories.

[@Bogdan0173]

Great insight on Swing particularities !

[@arastoomii4305]

Greaaaat talk! Thanks!

[@abrahambecker4508]

This is marvelous

[@kalisaminas9439]

omg thats my professor !

[@AsbjornOlling]

ouch, that crowd :( feel sorry for that guy

[@henryjames1931]

'the powers of 2 and 3' indeed.

[@taylordiclemente5163]

"Sufficiently approximate" - the white elephant in the room of western music.

[@JayPeek]

_thats_ some shit ;-)

[@dat_chip]

Honestly I find some of his explanations a bit far fetched, for example about the one about "why do we have 7 tones in an octave". It can be explained in much more simple mathematical terms using just fractions and rounding. No need for irregular and assymmetric shapes.