I was sad to learn about the recent death of Godfried Toussaint, whose work on the geometry of musical rhythm has been a major inspiration for me.
I never met Godfried, but I have read and re-read his work. His rhythm necklace diagrams were the direct inspiration for the Groove Pizza – I saw them and thought, I would love to have a drum programming interface like that.
Read tributes from colleagues here. Toussaint’s book The Geometry of Musical Rhythm is bottomlessly fascinating. You should also check out these papers:
- The rhythm that conquered the world: What makes a good rhythm good?
- The Euclidean algorithm generates traditional musical rhythms
- Classification and phylogenetic analysis of African ternary rhythm timelines
Thanks for all the ideas, Godfried.