Audience: Lower secondary students (Junior Cycle). This talk is an eclectic mix of mathematics, music and rhythm delivered by Dr Paco Gómez.

In this talk we will explore rotations of rhythms and in particular how to discover ways to perceive the rotation of a given rhythm. The discussion will lead us to a music movement called minimalism, which took place at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. This is a musical style characterised by a simplified rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Among the minimalist authors, we will study the work of Steve Reich, one of its main figures. He wrote a piece, Clapping Music, which will help us to study rotations of rhythm. This is a change-of-phase piece for two performers that only clap hands. Each one of them plays the same pattern throughout the piece. The change of phase is discrete, with one performer that begins the pattern from a different point in time, and advances after a few repetitions of the pattern. The other performer remains imperturbable, playing the same pattern without any change. We will examine the mathematical structure of this piece (symmetry, repetition, perceptual ambiguity).

Francisco (Paco) Gómez is a Professor at the Technical University of Madrid. He is one of the founding members of the Madrid Computational Geometry Group, and spent time at McGill University while completing his thesis. Since 2003, he has been researching Music Information Retrieval and Computational Music Theory. His other research interests include computational geometry, computer graphics and facility location.

Venue:

The Kings Hospital School

Date:

Tuesday, October 15th 2019

Time:

11.00am – 1.00pm

Audience:

Lower secondary students (Junior Cycle)

Booking info:

Invite only