Overview

One of the most widely observed responses to music listening is the spontaneous moving of one’s head or foot along with the “beat.” This phenomenon is linked to an almost unique human ability to detect regularity in auditory signals. A fundamental property of rhythmic regularity is that it can unify individuals through joint action, contributing to social cohesion and community building. However, musical cultures around the world are characterized by extremely complex rhythmic patterns that are often very difficult to follow. This project seeks to deepen our understanding of the human experience of complex musical rhythms by examining “polyrhythm,” the superposition of contrasting rhythms that cannot be easily mapped on a single metric framework. While polyrhythms are widespread around the world, this project focuses on examples of notated music from Europe and North America that afford a geographically- and historically-informed analysis of the development of polyrhythm. Originally assembled by Louis-Marc Suter (1928-2018), conductor, pedagogue, and musicologist, in his dissertation “Les polyrythmes dans la musique de vingt compositeurs de la première moitié du vingtième siècle, 1900–1950” (Université de Berne, 1980), the corpus features extracted example from works music composed during the first half of the twentieth century, a period during which the use of complex rhythms increased significantly.

The materials on this website are made available for perusal only. These materials may not be downloaded or reproduced in any way without the express written consent of the principal investigator.

For comments on the website, or if you would like to contribute to this project, please contact Dr. Ève Poudrier at eve.poudrier@ubc.ca.

Project Funding

The digitization of the Suter (1980) Corpus was supported in part by research grants from the Whitney Humanities Center (Yale University) and the Hampton Research Fund (University of British Columbia).

This research is supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.