Polyrhythm Visualizer
See, hear, and measure composite rhythms with up to eight streams at once.
What a polyrhythm is
A polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more pulse streams that share a cycle while dividing it differently: 3 against 4, 5 against 7, 2:3:5. The full cycle repeats every LCM of the pulse counts; between the first coincident downbeat and the next, each stream lands at its own fraction of the bar. The effect can look forbidding on paper, but it feels entirely natural in many traditions, from West African drumming to contemporary concert music and electronic production.
What the visualizer does
Configure between two and eight pulse streams, set the bar length in beats, pick a tempo, and the module computes the composite rhythm exactly. Each stream appears as a concentric ring around the circular display, with every attack marked on its ring. Points where two or more streams coincide are flagged as coincidence events. You can audition the composite pattern with transport controls, mute or solo individual streams to isolate relationships, and inspect cycle duration, LCM, composite attack count, and coincidence times.
Inputs
- Streams (2–8): each with its own pulse count, mute, and solo.
- Beats per cycle: how many selected beat-unit pulses make up one full repetition.
- Tempo and beat unit: BPM referenced to the selected pulse.
Outputs
- Cycle duration: in both milliseconds and beats.
- Cycle length in beats: the musical length of one full repetition.
- Coincidence points: every moment where two or more streams line up, with their times listed in milliseconds.
- Composite rhythm: the total number of attacks in the combined pattern.
- LCM in beats: useful for notating the grouping and for sanity-checking whether the cycle actually closes.
When to use it
Use the visualizer to study cross-rhythms for a composition, or to teach polyrhythmic independence by muting all but two streams and layering the others back in one at a time. It is the fastest way to check whether a 5:7 groove actually sounds the way you imagine it before committing it to notation, and to compare pulse-count combinations with sparse versus dense coincidence patterns, which matters when you are writing for instruments that need clear landmarks. For nested-tuplet durations and equivalent groupings inside a single pulse stream, use Rhythm & Subdivision.