ABSTRACT
Of course, not every rhythm in this family is considered to be a “good” rhythm, in the sense that it has been adopted as a timeline pattern in traditional music somewhere on the planet. Indeed, the ancient Greek music scholar Aristoxenus of Tarentum wrote in his Elements of Rhythm in the sixth century BC that not every division of a time span yields a rhythm that is rhythmical, by which he meant “good.” Aristoxenus reserved the term eurhythmical for those rhythms that were beautifully rhythmical. However, he did not provide any algorithms for generating eurhythmic rhythms, and was content to emphasize that for examples of eurhythmic rhythms one should turn to the compositions of the great masters.* In contrast, one of the main goals of this book is precisely the design of algorithms for generating good rhythms using simple mathematical principles.
