A Simple Trick to Understand Complex Rhythms

Using multisyllabic words...

There’s a rather simple trick anyone can use to understand complex rhythm cycles of any number of beats. I learned this from a teacher of Bulgarian line dancing, which is performed to Bulgarian folk songs, which have many polyrhythmic cycles of 7, 9, 11 or 13 beats.

Usually, they can be broken down into groupings of 2 beats and 3 beats. Note that 2 and 3 are prime numbers with which you can compose any rhythm of more than 2 beats. You can make cycles of 2, 3, 4=2+2, 5=2+3, 6=2+2+2 or 3+3, 7=2+3+2 or 2+2+3 or 3+2+2, and so on.

So, the idea here is very basic. In whatever your primary language is, you need to choose two words - one with 2 syllables and another with 3 syllables - and then you can just use those words to construct any polyrhythm.

For example, in English, you can use “apple” for the 2-syllable word and “galloping” for the 3-syllable word. Now, to construct a 5 beat cycle, you can just repeat “apple-galloping” and voila! There you have it. Similarly, to construct a 7 beat cycle, you can repeat “apple-apple-galloping” or “apple-galloping-apple” or, well you get the idea.

There’s a basic assumption being made here, and that is that each syllable must have the same duration in speech. Each syllable needs to occupy the same length of time, which for our purposes could be considered to be the unit length of a syllable. If this is true, then “apple” + “galloping” adds up to 5 units. Of course, if you say “apple” much faster than “galloping,” well then this won’t work.

You could also use the single-syllable word “It” to indicate silence. So, a 7 beat cycle could be constructed as “Galloping-Galloping-It” which would correspond to 3+3+1. To be honest, you can pick any words that you want, which have a natural emphasis on whatever syllable is necessary to mimic the emphasized beat in the rhythm.

In this manner, in particular, you could represent the 6/8 cycle I had explained in my previous post I Mada - Habib Koité & Bamana as “GAlloping-GAlloping-LaCONic-LaCONic”. Here, I picked galloping and laconic, because the emphasis is on ga and con in normal spoken English.