Most Common Melodic Rhythms

Have a look at figure 9 in this article:

Tone and Voice: A Derivation of the Rules of Voice-leading from Perceptual Principles

Since most melodic material clusters around the eighth note, and since every melody I analyzed both western popular and oriental folk music contain eighth notes within 2 measuresor so, we can eliminate all rhythms which do not contain eighth notes as being much more rare. With that in mind, I created a rhythm chart of the likely rhythms one would encounter in a popular melody.

Some rhythm schemes analyzed have only 3 rhythmic positions occupied, most have four as I've created on the chart but may not start on the downbeat. Many popular melodic rhythms do not contain a "c" cell. A tie can be placed anywhere, effectively expanding this chart exponentially. There are more a' (read a prime) and b' in popular music than in folk music where primes are fairly nonexistant. The primes represent just a slight rhythmic variation, either with the addition of a sixteenth note somewhere or a part of the rhythm subtracted. Sometimes this is created with a tie to a repeating rhythmic cell from the previous, perhaps creating a^a' b b or a b^a' b.

Green means they are the most common rhythms. They are the most common because they contain two or more pairs of eighth notes. Yellow means be careful because they only have one set of eighth notes or too many sixteenth notes. Red means there is only one set of eighth notes AND too many sixteenth notes. Blue means syncopated. Brown means ignore my scribbles.

Eighth note triples and quarter note triplets occur much more frequently, for example, in Bob Marley's music but are not covered here. Another kind of syncopated rhythm that also occurs in popular music is the eighth note followed by a quarter note, folowed by another eighth note but is not covered here because it is rare enough not to warrant it.

Lastly an eighth note rest followed by an eighth note is a fairly common starting rhythm especially for verses and also for classical music but is also not included because it is not likely to repeat except at the beginning of another phrase or subphrase.

These rhythms can be found under my pics at MySpace.com - Greg - Las Vegas /Bali, Indonesia - Ambient / Electronica / Experimental - www.myspace.com/gongchime on the second page of the Music Composition folder or on Photobucket at

Care to explain what you intend for us to learn from this?

Only probabilites. Next is to take the most common melodic solutions and the most common rhythmic solutions to arrive at merely competent music. As they say in Expert Systems circles, always competent beats ocassionally brilliant probably also for the average working composer.

Ah, are you intending to build an expert system out of all of this accumulated research? Something that will spit out average sounding melodies at the click of a button? Does such a thing already exist?

So, in other words, this is all completly pointless, right?

Compiling a list of most common motivic outlines and rhythmic fragments as a means of... what? Writing banal ordinary tunes?

I think in popular/folk music, rhythms are generally iambic, because that's how we speak. Either in a DAdaDAdaDA fashion or DAdadaDAdadaDA fashion. Not to say there aren't variations, of course there are. But look at that last sentence: of COURSE there ARE. Perfectly masculine iambic. That's how speech patterns go, so I think a lot of popular music follows suit.

Originally Posted by Dan Gilbert

You guys have it all wrong. All you have to do is get really, really, really, really, really, really, really, high. Then go back and re-read the original post and look at the drawings. Once the words start moving around and the circular charts start spinning, then you will finally understand it.

This is the most important step...

But speach patterns are heavily dependant on the actual rhythm of the particular language.

for example, the tonic accent of the word "animal" in English is

A-nimal

while in french it is

ani-MAL

it's basically the same word, the same meaning, the same number of syllables, but the mirror one of the other.

Tonic accents decide the particular rhythmic flavour of a language.

I would even argue that there is some stress on the first syllable in French. Not the same way we stress it in English, but some stress, making it, again, iambic.

Nah, just playing around with stuff. And helping future composers who find this thread, start within the ballpark of expectations. Forgot to mention that ending rhythms are usually lengthened. There was something else too but I'll have to remember what it was. Hmmm....