Actual RhythmsThe corpus in numbers
81,046 rhythms, every one from real music.
What's inside Actual Rhythms: where the pieces come from, how old they are, which time signatures and figures they use, and how hard they get. Hover or tap any bar for its exact numbers.
Genres
Folk tunes are most of the pieces. Jazz and classical give the most rhythms.
A folk tune is short, so it gives a few rhythms. A string quartet movement or a recorded solo runs for hundreds of bars, and nearly every few bars is a new rhythm.
Pieces
Each piece counts once.
Rhythms
A rhythm counts once in every genre it appears in.
Rhythms per piece
Long works give many; a folk tune gives a few.
Show the numbers
| Genre | Pieces | Rhythms | Rhythms per piece |
|---|---|---|---|
| Folk tunes | 10,196 | 33,555 | 3.3 |
| Bach chorales | 409 | 2,306 | 5.6 |
| Classical | 118 | 15,905 | 134.8 |
| Ragtime | 47 | 1,837 | 39.1 |
| Jazz | 584 | 24,517 | 42.0 |
| Pop songs | 527 | 7,395 | 14.0 |
| Latin patterns | 19 | 19 | 1.0 |
| African timelines | 5 | 5 | 1.0 |
Collections
Where the pieces come from.
Every collection with nine pieces or more, colored by genre. The Essen collection alone holds 6,060 folk songs from Germany, China and across Europe.
Four centuries
From a 1592 madrigal to a 2023 record.
Dated pieces by decade, by the year they were composed, published or recorded. Each row is scaled to its own busiest decade. Folk tunes are dated by the collections that printed them, which is why they cluster.
Places
Germany, Ireland and China lead.
Pieces by country of origin, where the source names one.
Time signatures
Over half the rhythms are in 4/4.
Share of all rhythms by meter. 39,328 rhythms are two bars long and 41,702 are four.
Difficulty
Jazz reads hardest, Bach easiest.
Each genre's rhythms by level, from steady beats (1) to triplets, 32nds and sixteenth syncopation (5). Jazz is the hardest: 77% of its rhythms are level 5, then ragtime at 53%. Bach's chorales are the gentlest, half of them at level 2. Folk tunes sit at level 4, the sixteenths of reels and hornpipes.
Rhythmic fingerprint
What each genre asks you to read.
The share of each genre's rhythms that contain sixteenths or 32nds, dotted notes, ties, or triplets. Darker is more.
Tempo
Jazz at the speed of the record.
553 jazz recordings have a known tempo, from a 37 BPM ballad to a 361 BPM burn. Half are faster than 175 BPM. The app's Original button plays each excerpt at its record's tempo.
The most common rhythms
The figures you'll meet most often.
The two-bar rhythms found in the most pieces. Common figures come up often in the app because they come up often in music.
The hardest
The most demanding two bars in the corpus.
Sextuplets, 32nds, dotted sixteenths and ties across the beat, all in two bars of a ballad.
Counted from the Actual Rhythms corpus: the music21 corpus, Craig Stuart Sapp's edition of Joplin's rags, OpenEWLD lead sheets, the Weimar Jazz Database, the Essen, O'Neill, Ryan and Aird collections, and Michael Van Bebber's jazz and song transcriptions and Charlie Parker 60 Melodies and Solos. A rhythm is two or four bars; the same rhythm in several pieces counts once. Notation drawn by the app.