(Does Your Rhythm Suck?) Steve Reich’s Clapping Music app

[A. Scherze]

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/rhythm-...game-can-help/

Good news if you can’t hold a beat: An app called Steve Reich’s Clapping Music might be able to fix you.

Clapping Music, from the British app shop Touchpress, is a gamified lesson in tempo. It plays 13 different drum-like audio patterns, then asks players to replicate them by tapping on the screen. When you perform the first sequence correctly, you’re automatically promoted a rung. If you can succeed at every level—and that’s a big if, because this game is hard—you win.

Before it was an iOS game, Clapping Music was a piece of music Steve Reich composed in 1972 without instruments. To play it, one person claps out a basic rhythm. A second player joins in but shifts the rhythm slightly and eventually rejoins the first player’s beat. It’s incredibly difficult to do without getting thrown off, but when performed the way it was intended, the clapping creates an ecstatic symphony.

Touchpress created its mobile tutorial after the London Sinfonietta approached the studio with the mission of engaging a new audience with Reich’s material. Alan Martyn, a producer at Touchpress, says the design team quickly realized that a game was the right approach, but that in order to work, it needed to be genuinely fun and not bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating—a big risk for a game involving ceaseless tapping.

The interface was modeled on a retro arcade game. The main screen look uncannily like Pac-Man, with horizontal rows of pastel dots against a black screen. Each dot is hollow, and when it becomes solid, that’s the cue to tap the rhythm on screen. Like Tetris, the rows cascade down the screen to indicate where you should be focusing your attention. The stripped-down feel is a response to other popular music tutorial games on the market. “Guitar Hero has this overbearing 3-D feeling, and we really wanted to avoid that,” Martyn says. “We wanted it to have the minimum possible visual stimuli, so we would force people to listen while they played the game.”

Martyn says Clapping Music’s players have already logged around 8,000 hours on the app. Eventually, all that data will go to two neuroscientists at Queen Mary University of London studying how the human brain learns and adapts to rhythm. Let’s hope that the researchers find that one’s sense of rhythm really can improve.

[A. Scherze]

[rcarlberg]

Meh, the problem I've always had with Steve Reich's music is the mechanical nature of the beat. Real musicians usually play with a little barbeque sauce in their beat, and it makes the music a lot more "alive".

[Steve F.]

Meh, the problem I've always had with Steve Reich's music is the mechanical nature of the beat. Real musicians usually play with a little barbeque sauce in their beat, and it makes the music a lot more "alive".

Reich's a genius and a trend-setter. Listen harder.

[nosebone]

Reich's a genius and a trend-setter. Listen harder.

[battema]

Saw the man perform Clapping Music two years ago at Big Ears. Never thought I'd be so mesmerized by two dudes clapping...absolutely awesome.

[Baribrotzer]

Meh, the problem I've always had with Steve Reich's music is the mechanical nature of the beat. Real musicians usually play with a little barbeque sauce in their beat, and it makes the music a lot more "alive".

If that's the case, I don't think it's Reich's fault so much as that of the classical musicians who usually play his work. Your typical good classical player has solid time, but may have rather a stiff feel - often because they're sight-reading like a mo-fo, and can't really get a feel for music they've barely heard before. And because this piece involves displacing rhythms by an eighth-note at a time, playing it with any swing either results in negating the point of it, or creating a discrepancy as to where the pulse is.

[Steve F.]

If that's the case, I don't think it's Reich's fault so much as that of the classical musicians who usually play his work. Your typical good classical player has solid time, but may have rather a stiff feel - often because they're sight-reading like a mo-fo, and can't really get a feel for music ...

A very good point. His compositions are not diminished as works because the performers don't spend enough time rehearsing them...

[proggy_jazzer]

I agree with this wholeheartedly (emphasis added):

If that's the case, I don't think it's Reich's fault so much as that of the classical musicians who usually play his work. Your typical good classical player has solid time, but may have rather a stiff feel - often because they're sight-reading like a mo-fo, and can't really get a feel for music they've barely heard before. And because this piece involves displacing rhythms by an eighth-note at a time, playing it with any swing either results in negating the point of it, or creating a discrepancy as to where the pulse is.

Viz:



Here's what I think is a very good performance, and it makes the connection to 80s Crimson very obvious. The amazing thing about KC, though, was they took material like this and made it groove in a serious way, which the BOaC folks, for all their skill, only rarely get to; I attribute this entirely to the fact that they're reading the charts.

[nosebone]

That was great!
thx pj

[Baribrotzer]

Here's what I think is a very good performance, and it makes the connection to 80s Crimson very obvious. The amazing thing about KC, though, was they took material like this and made it groove in a serious way, which the BOaC folks, for all their skill, only rarely get to; I attribute this entirely to the fact that they're reading the charts.

And it's not that they don't know how to groove - Mark Stewart, the long-haired guitarist, has the day job of leading Paul Simon's live band. But another issue is that it may require a different rhythmic sense than rock or funk or jazz, more about utter precision than feel. Reich works in rhythmic superimpositions a whole lot, such that the on-beat and the off-beat may be in four different places in four different parts, and if the time isn't square as a board, you'll have parts flamming against each other and generally sounding sloppy.

[chalkpie]

Yeah, that was a great piece (checked it out last night). Sure, there might be millions of real musicians playing with more BBQ in their beat (I'm not totally sure I know what that means), but the shit they're playing is about 1/9,000,000,000 as interesting as a piece like "Music for 18 Musicians", "Music for a Large Ensemble", "City Life", etc , so I'll keep it just the way it is. Plus if you are actually comparing performances, you'd be surprised at how different recordings can be of the same piece(s) by various ensembles.

[Steve F.]

Here's what I think is a very good performance, and it makes the connection to 80s Crimson very obvious. The amazing thing about KC, though, was they took material like this and made it groove in a serious way, which the BOaC folks, for all their skill, only rarely get to; I attribute this entirely to the fact that they're reading the charts.

I saw them play that piece. If the drummer didn't have to play the charts exactly as written (which he does, since they are a 'classical ensemble' - no deviation allowed!), it would definitely breathe and groove more.

"groove" isn't a concern for a classical composer of Reich's generation, even for a groovy composer like Steve Reich.

[No Pride]

I agree with this wholeheartedly (emphasis added):



Viz:



Here's what I think is a very good performance, and it makes the connection to 80s Crimson very obvious.

That was cool! And I agree with the '80s KC reference, but...

I keep hearing snare notes that the drummer isn't playing when you watch. What's up with that?

[Mike D]

That was cool! And I agree with the '80s KC reference, but...

I keep hearing snare notes that the drummer isn't playing when you watch. What's up with that?

From what I read on the Bang on a Can website, this piece can either be performed as a double-sextet, or with a sextet playing along with a recording of themselves. The latter is what's going on in this video.

It does look strange. At first, I thought the drummer might have a pedal-operated snare, but no. Great piece of music.

[A. Scherze]

http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Steve-Reich-2x5/54069

Programme Note

My first thought was that with two electric basses I could write interlocking bass lines that would be clearly heard. This would not be possible on acoustical basses played pizzicato. I then began to think about 2 pianos and 2 electric basses being the motor for a piece that would use electric guitars and small drum kit as well. The classic rock combination of 2 electric guitars, electric bass, drums and piano seemed perfect - so long as it was a doubled quintet resulting in 2 basses, 2 pianos, 2 drums and 4 electric guitars. This made possible interlocking canons of identical instruments. The piece can be played either with 5 live musicians and 5 pre-recorded or with 10 musicians.

2x5 is clearly not rock and roll. Like any other composition, it's completely notated while Rock is generally not. 2x5 is chamber music for rock instruments.

We're living at a time when the worlds of concert music and popular music have resumed their normal dialogue after a brief pause during the 12 tone/serial period. This dialogue has been active, I would assume, since people have been making music. We know from notation that it was active throughout the Renaissance with the folk song L'homme Armè used in Masses by composers from Dufay to Palestrina. During the Baroque period dance forms were used by composers from Froberger and Lully to Bach and Handel. Later we have a folk songs in Haydn's 104th, Beethoven's 6th, Russian folk songs in Stravinsky's early Ballets, Serbo Croatian folk music throughout Bartok, Hymns in Ives, folk songs and jazz in Copland, the entire works of Weill, Gershwin and Sondheim and on into my own generation and beyond. Electric Guitars, Electric Basses and drum kits, along with samplers, synthesizers and other electronic sound processing devices are now part of notated concert music. The dialogue continues.

Steve Reich - 2008

[A. Scherze]