Concentric Rhythm

Concentric Rhythm is an interactive tool for generating, developing, and exploring musical patterns. It uses geometric transformations and many other simple processes to create, develop, and evolve music.

The looping musical timeline is visualized as a circle, which allows you to treat musical patterns as concentric shapes. This makes performing geometric transformations such as rotations, reflections and folding very natural and intuitive. It also provides tools for melodic lines such as random-walk generation and scale-based inversion and transposition. You can generate rhythmic lines using cross-rhythms or the Euclidean algorithm, and allows for great visualisations of complex polyrhythms.

Concentric Rhythm now allows you to assign each pattern to a different MIDI channel and send your results to other MIDI compatible apps or devices.

Concentric Rhythm was originally developed as a new way to improvise electronic music, but it is also a great tool experimenting with and developing musical material, or just for casually playing with music in a unique, hands-on, way.

Many of the ideas here were inspired by the book ‘The Geometry of Musical Rhythm’ and this app is a powerful tool for anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas. But at the same time is easy enough to use that anyone (even with no musical or mathematical background) can make interesting musical patterns and think about the musical world a little differently.

Note: There are known compatibility issues when used with AUM, especially on iOS 14