RHY.2:11 - SoTA-Echoing

Godfried T. Toussaint’s The Geometry of Musical Rhythm, second edition (2020), chapters 1–2, provides a productive treatment of attack and duration patterns within a declared scope. Adopt its explicit abstraction for questions that retain what the construction needs; adapt the scope when movement or response matters. Geometric economy is valuable only while it preserves the receiving operation.

Robert O. Gjerdingen’s “Smooth” Rhythms as Probes of Entrainment supplies a historical counterexample to treating all rhythmic material as discrete attacks: smoothly modulated sounds can elicit rhythmic responses. Adopt the representational challenge. Its informal observations and proposed perceptual mechanism do not establish a universal segmentation rule.

For a simple entrance, an ordered sequence is cheaper and sufficient. For a continuously shaped sound or motion, retaining the changing envelope can prevent a false equivalence that the sequence alone cannot resolve.