Rhythms are everywhere. From our breathing bodies to our daily lives, we are locked into rhythms in every aspect of life. Without us even realising, our bodies are tied into cyclic patterns which repeat and keep us alive. We exist in social rhythms such as 'living for the weekend' and celebrate yearly events which bring us together in our communities. We adopt patterns of behaviour to get our points across and our needs met.
If you've ever picked up a spoon and dinged a little rhythm on the side of the tea cup, or tapped your feet to a song, then you are hearing and creating your own creative rhythms. You may not think that you're musical but when you tap out a rhythm, you're interacting with music and joining others, meeting them in the music which you both hear and can share a moment. These rhythms that we create and hear have direct connection with our inner body rhythms and outer rhythms in our world, all rhythms are important. Connecting with rhythms helps humans to regulate their inner and outer lives by focusing on breathing and re-connecting with internal and external rhythms.
Rhythms can be simple, or complex. This week, I am practicing the Takadimi or Ta-ka-di-mi rhythmic system to learn notated rhythms. Each sound verbally represents a measure of time which make up the rhythm, the words and syllables help you to verbalise the timing of each phrase:
This excerpt has been taken from the Takadimi Short Guide, which you can find here:
The reason for learning phonetic rhythms is to help with the sight reading of rhythms. When reading music, learning the rhythms which you will come across in the music is as important as learning the notes or the key signatures. And because Takadimi is a system, you can learn how to quickly distinguish between rhythms visually. This process can be as simple common patterns such as - ta, ta, ta-di, ta-di or incredibly complex using compound metre (complex time signatures such as 6/4). See the document above to explore these sounds, rhythms and exercises if you feel bold enough!
Hopefully I will get as quick as the people in the awesome example below.
Something that sounds that good is definitely worth practicing!