Rhythms of the world

This page is the index to Resona's 554 rhythms, taals, cycles and practice patterns from around the world, each written as its cycle and accents and each playable on the metronome at its own tempo. They sit in 11 regions (India, the Middle East, the Balkans, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia with the Pacific, plus instrument practice and the drum kit). Pick one below.

Most metronomes count four with a louder first click, which covers a small corner of how people keep time. A cycle can carry gestures, drum strokes, dance steps, syllables or a destination. Teentaal is more than 16/4, soleá more than twelve quarters, son clave more than five notes on a sixteen-pulse grid.

A tabla player holds sixteen matras, counting units, in four vibhags, sections, shown by the hands as clap, clap, wave, clap. The wave, khali, is not an empty beat; the drum still speaks, with a different weight. Everything returns to sam, the first point of the cycle.

An Arabic percussionist speaks an iqa', a rhythmic cycle, as dum, the low open stroke, and tak, the sharper rim stroke, with rests that matter as much as the strokes. Maqsum goes dum tak, rest tak, dum, rest, tak, rest, and a click on every subdivision only hides it.

In Bulgaria seven may be quick, quick, slow, and nobody dancing at a wedding counts it; the feet know the last step takes longer. Eleven can be two, two, three, two, two, alarming on paper and easy said aloud while walking.

In a Javanese gamelan cycle such as lancaran the great gong lands on the final beat, so the cycle gathers weight towards its close instead of starting with it.

Every entry has a counting grid, a grouping, accents, silences, marks, a tempo unit and a subdivision. Hindustani taal marks sam with ×, each tali, a clapped division, with its number, and khali with 0. Arabic rhythms mark dum D and tak T, gamelan marks kenong, kempul, gong and an unstruck place N, P, G and W, and guitar patterns use D and U for down and up, leaving a skipped strum hollow because the hand keeps moving while the pick misses.

The metronome cannot play ghost notes, the unequal beats of every local polska or several interlocking instruments, and some rows are practice scaffolds. Dembow is more than tresillo, kuku more than a four-beat frame, and a gamelan gong outline less than the ensemble. The region pages say so where it matters.

Press play, count aloud, clap the landmarks, then add a hand or foot. Say an uneven cycle's groups rather than every unit, speak the strokes that have names, and slow down before adding notes.

Try teentaal first, because claps and a wave make sixteen physical. Then maqsum, where dum, tak and silence teach more than an even click, and ruchenitsa, where quick, quick, slow makes seven a dance rather than an arithmetic problem.