These days, I’m learning how to work with this vessel, my body. I’m constantly weighing the balance between acceptance and change and generally speaking, I sometimes tend to over-index on changing myself (in spirit of growth). In spirit of leveraging the way I am wired, I’m practicing leveraging my analytical mind in the context of dance. Often, we’re told as dancers to “shut off the mind” because thinking too much during dance can in fact impede your ability to move. This is true in many contexts and situations.
But how can I honor the part of my brain that is analytical? This has been on my mind lately especially after my 1:1 dance lesson with Jevan, who nonchalantly said “What if [having an analytical mind] can be your superpower [in dance]?”
Identifying rhythmic challenges during dance class
One of the many benefits of attending dance class is that they can sometimes reveal and help you become aware of weaknesses, or opportunities for growth. And last week, during Jevan’s class that I attend ritually, I noticed that I was struggling just a tad with identifying rhythmic patterns that were a bit more complex than the typical “1 and 2 and 3 and 4”. For instance, when he shouted (something along the lines of) “4 and 2 3”. At the same time, I struggled to clap the rhythm while dancing at the same time.
Writing a software program to practice identifying rhythmic patterns
Following the class, the next morning, I had the thought to do some ear training (similar to how when I took singing and guitar lessons for years, I’d practice singing major and minor scales) by writing my own little piece of software.
The command line program essentially generates a random rhythm and repeatedly plays the rhythm with kick drums and high hats. I for now initially constrained the program to only play 8 notes — 1 bars where each note is an eighth note — which means there’s a total of 256 rhythmic patterns. This constraint seems sufficient (for now) to train my ears since doubling the number of bars — from 1 to 2 bars, a total of 16 notes — would increase the total number of rhythmic patterns to 65,536.
Implementation details
I define an 8-bit map and then generate all the possible computations. Then during each invocation, a random rhythmic pattern is chosen. For each bit in the bit-map, if the bit is flipped, a sound will be played. The type of sound depends. If the bit’s position sits either any of the whole notes (i.e. “1 2 3 4”), then a kick drum sound plays. In contrast, if the bit’s position is on any of the “and” (
Anyways, for 8 counts, there’s a 8-bit map, each bit representing an 8th note. if a bit — possible value is zero or one — is set (i.e: one), then a sound will be played. On the 1 2 3 4, sound of a kick drum. On any of the “and” a high hat.
1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0
This rhythm, converts to words, equates to:
“ONE … TWO and … and FOUR”
Of course this is ear training but I am incorporating this into my practice. It’s a tool. It’s not meant to replace listening to music. But I am finding that being able to identify the rhythm with the program seems to improve my ability to identify rhythmic patterns of certain instruments in real music tracks.
One other addition I made to the program. Since it can be challenging to identify when the bar starts — since I initially only played a kick drum and high hat — the program always play a metronome sound, a “click”, on the one. Eventually, I made relax this and remove it.
