Rhythmic Processes in Electronic Music

Electronic technology has liberated musical time and changed musical aesthetics. In the past, musical time was considered as a linear medium that was subdivided according to ratios and intervals of a more-or-less steady meter. However, the possibilities of envelope control and the creation of liquid or cloud-like sound morphologies suggests a view of rhythm not as a fixed set of intervals on a time grid, but rather as a continuously flowing, undulating, and malleable temporal substrate upon which events can be scattered, sprinkled, sprayed, or stirred at will. In this view, composition is not a matter of filling or dividing time, but rather of generating time. The core of this paper introduces aspects of rhythmic discourse that appear in my electronic music. These include: the design of phrases and figures, exploring a particle-based rhythmic discourse, deploying polyrhythmic processes, the shaping of streams and clouds, using fields of attraction and repulsion, creating pulsation and pitched tones by particle replication, using reverberant space as a cadence, contrasting ostinato and intermittency, using echoes as rhythmic elements, and composing with tape echo feedback. The lecture is accompanied by sound examples. The text is derived from a chapter on rhythm in my forthcoming book Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic [1].