ABSTRACT
As we have seen several times already, the clave son pattern in binary notation consists of ve onsets among 16 pulses. It has also been pointed out early on in this book that the number of ways one may select ve items from among a collection 16 items is given by the formula (16!)/(5!)(11!) that yields the number 4368. is is a large number of patterns. However, most of these are unsuitable for use as timeline rhythms. So far in this book, many systematic methods have been described for reducing the size of this large set by discarding rhythms that do not possess certain properties deemed desirable. A dierent approach, and one that proceeds in the opposite direction, starts out with one excellent rhythm as a seed rhythm from which it generates a family of close relatives that hopefully inherit goodness by virtue of their proximity to the seed rhythm. In fact, an example of this approach has already been discussed in the case in which a maximally even rhythm was used to generate a family of almost maximally even rhythms. In that approach, the rhythm was viewed as a binary sequence, and each onset was swapped with its neighboring silent pulse on either side. In this chapter, the rhythm is viewed instead as a durational pattern, or a sequence of inter-onset intervals, and a family of rhythms is obtained from one good rhythm by swapping the positions of the inter-onset intervals of the good rhythm, that is, by generating all the permutations of these intervals.* As an example of this approach, take as the seed rhythm, the clave son.
