Dump traditional rhythmic terminology: a thought experiment

[stubbsonic]

I guess the nice thing about 4/4 is that you get to eat the whole pie, and the servings are a quarter of a pie.

What pie were you picturing the whole time? (For me it's apple. It was always apple. Though I love most tart fruit pies. BTW, at my wedding? no cake. Apple, Peach, Strawberry Peach pies.)

[Phil O]

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510



approximately

[MIDI Life Crisis]

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510



approximately

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
______________________________________________________________________
-------------------------------4

Time signature for the piece that never ends!

[stubbsonic]

I was curious about a hardware step sequencer that I recently heard about called a Pyramid (by Squarp). It looks like a very flexible beast with several options of "polymetric" and "polyrhythmic" structure, and a "Euclidean Mode".

I was confused by the online documentation, which seemed to give an overview of possibilities without details. I simply wanted to know if I could set the number of steps per beat. I've gone back and forth three times in emails, and the responses have been very nice, but a bit unclear.

I thought of this thread because it is an example of how sometimes software/hardware developers think that a time-signature is the best way not only to communicate a time system but to structure it. I don't know which is worse. The results usually mean that the program is more limited than it needs to be. In this case, and it just muddies the waters.

I went on their user forum and found a few threads where users were stumped about how to make a certain rhythmic structure. If I understand it correctly, the device forces you to relate everything to a 4/4 bar. There may be ways to get things to work as you want, but there's doesn't seem to be a simple way for some things.

Because a time-signature is designed as a "legend" to let you know what the printed notation means, it has far less significance in a hardware sequencer.

If we were in 2/2 vs 4/4 vs 8/8 vs 16/16, how would the sequencer treat those differently in relation to the tempo? In notation, the differences might be vaguely defined. Does it handle 3/8, 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 with a dotted quarter or eighth note as the beat? (Probably the latter).

If they abandoned the time-signature altogether there could be simpler approaches. A user could simply define a number of steps per measure and a rate of steps per tempo-beat. For this particular device, that might create other challenges. However, like the iOS app, Patterning (v1), if you have to base everything on a cycle of 4 beats, it is an arbitrary limitation. Fortunately, Patterning v2 addressed this limitation.