“There’s too much thinking involved in making electronic music - I think it should be more about expression… and feeling.”

The Euclidean algorithm - it binds African rhythms, nuclear physics accelerators, string theory, and soon, dance floors of the electronic underground. Developed by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, the algorithm is a mathematical method for finding the greatest common divisor between two numbers - simply put, the largest number that divides two numbers without a remainder. Ugh, yeah, math - but this old numerical theory turned out to be a fundamental concept underlying traditional rhythms, particularly in Greece, India, Namibia, Rwanda, and Central Africa. 

Euclidean rhythms can be found in N-geru and Yalli ballads by the nomadic Tuareg people of the Sahara, make up the Rupaka Tisra tala of South Indian music, Korean Buddhist chants, and were more recently used by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky for his Symphony No. 6 and form the meter for Dave Brubeck’s Take Five.

So what’s this ubiquitous pattern? Discovered by Canadian computer scientist Godfried Toussaint at McGill University, the Euclidean rhythm evenly distributes a given number of pulses (or notes) across a chosen number of steps (how long a sequence will be) in a rhythmic loop. In manipulating just these two parameters, there’s an endless potential of different rhythmic patterns to be made.

Now that that’s out of the way, why are we talking about ones and zeroes? Remember raves? There are people actually doing research to make the experience even better. A few years ago, a group of friends - Mathias Bredholt, Mathias Kirkegaard, Lars Buchholtz and Jonas Kenton - founded Torso Electronics, a budding music hardware company in Copenhagen. All musicians and/or engineers, they shared a vision for adding more improvisation, more spontaneity to playing live electronic music - and so they came up with a MIDI device called the T-1: a euclidean rhythm sequencer. 

I caught up with Mathias B. (AKA Areal) to talk about how it all started. 

Maya for Also Cool: Could you explain what a ‘euclidean sequencer’ does and how that concept makes the T-1 special as a new drum machine?

Mathias: I really wanted to make something that’s easy to perform with. It's all about immediate response. The cool thing about euclidean sequencing is that you can do it on stage - normally, (with live hardware sets) you enable steps at different sequences. You program the rhythm, but it’s really hard to make radical, sudden changes. 

It was actually a researcher at McGill who came up with it like 15 years ago. He did a study on traditional African rhythms and how they have this commonality - they all share a property that every rhythmic event has this evenness. 

If you take a time sequence, or some duration of time, in each of these rhythms there will be a repeating pattern of equally distributed rhythms. He came up with this simple algorithm with only two parameters to create all these different kinds of patterns. It's really just two numbers that you need - and we created two knobs dedicated for this purpose. With only these two controls, you can create rhythms instantly - and you can change them. You can make them really dense or make them really sparse... and it works great for live performances. You can control how energetic the pattern is going to be - and the cool thing is that they all sound good, no matter what you do. 

Also Cool: How does that change a typical production workflow?

M: The T-1 is a happy accident machine. It's all about listening. If you really get to learn it, you will be able to predict more of what it will do, but to begin with, it’s a tool for exploration. It’s really good if you're stuck and don't really know what to play on your keyboard - you can just start the machine and it will create something for you. You can explore, turn the knobs - and you don't really have to think to use it. That’s what makes it very different from a lot of drum machines - electronic music is too much about thinking. And it's also too visually-oriented. 

If you work with Ableton, [writing MIDI] is a lot of putting notes in various places, and you have to know some music theory to be able to do that, because otherwise you’re just going to create rhythms that are not in time. When I was teaching electronic music, I noticed that it was very common for people to end up making music in weird time signatures. When you use a computer, you just type stuff in, then listen to it, and decide if it sounds good or not. I think what we’re trying to do is to add some more exploration to electronic music - so you can just play it and not have to think about it. Sort of like if you play the piano. There’s too much thinking involved in making electronic music - I think it should be more about expression… and feeling.

AC: What is the story of how this thing came to be?

M: My friend Mathias and I both studied electrical engineering and met each other at university. We came up with the sequencer as our thesis project in undergrad. Then we worked together with Jonas (Kenton Slash Demon, When Saints Go Machine) - our friend who is a very talented producer and musician. He’s got a lot of experience playing live all over the world - and we also had this idea of playing live music and improvising on stage. He was frustrated that after playing live [electronic music] for over ten years, you still always have to prepare everything - that it feels like you’re not really connected with the music. You can’t really improvise. So we all shared this idea and started working on it.

Mathias and I went to Montreal for two years - we were afraid that the project wouldn’t succeed because it’s pretty hard to keep up the excitement when we were all so far away - but the lab that we were in at McGill gave us a lot of inspiration. We were in the Input Devices and Musical Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL), which is focused on the expressivity and live performances of electronic music - and the embodiment of electronic music. It really follows along the same lines of what we were trying to do. At IDMIL we also explored adding various controls that would allow [the user] to interact with the instrument and use their body to control it more. 

In academia it’s pretty common to see electronic music performed with various gestural controllers that sense your motion and then affect the music in different ways. It’s not very common to see that in the underground music scene. I’m really curious to see how we can merge these two worlds together with the sequencer. 

During their time in Montreal, both Mathias B. and Mathias K. performed at various local venues, including Eastern Bloc, La Sala Rossa, and Café Résonance - and they also hosted basement jams. Now that they’re back in Copenhagen, Torso just launched a Kickstater campaign to build the first series of T-1 sequencers - and after passing their goal on just the first day, they’ve definitely kicked off on a good note! Keep an eye out for euclidean rhythm sequencers at the next rave…

Learn more about the T-1 sequencer here. 

Support the Torso Electronics team on Kickstarter.

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