After encountering some buzz about it online, I read and was inspired by Godfried Toussaint’s paper, “The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms”. In short, he demonstrates how many classic rhythms, particularly of African origin, can be described by a ubiquitous mathematical principle first documented by Euclid and even used for timing patterns in neutron accelerators.
However, while I found many implementations of the algorithm in various languages, all of the ones I tried (in Ruby, Python, Java, and Javascript) return inaccurate results! Trying 13 steps with 5 pulses was an easy way to break most of them. Luckily, Toussaint’s source, Björklund, provides C code in his paper The Theory of Rep-Rate Pattern Generation in the SNS Timing System. I translated this into Python 3, and found the result to be elegant, efficient, and accurate.
Copyright (c) 2011 Brian House
This code is released under the MIT License and is completely free to use for any purpose. See the LICENSE file for details.
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