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Polyrhythyms

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This is a visualization tool to help musicians see and understand complex polyrhythms. Each column of boxes represents a unit of time; a gray box represents a beat and a colored box represents a rest. The period of the polyrhythym is defined by the least common multiple of all the individual rhythyms.

Contributed by: Rob Morris (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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Snapshot 1: A simple 2 against 3 polyrhythm. It has a counting period of 6 beats. A convenient phrase to help with this polyrhythm is "not dif-i-cult". The 3-beat hits on "not", "dif", and "cult" whereas the 2-beat hits on "not" and "i".

Snaphsot 2: The more complex polyrhythm 7 against 8 has a period of 56 beats.

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