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derpifiedtoday at 3:41 PM0 repliesview on HN

I'm not an expert but I was just looking into this so I will leave this link here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm

If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible. Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.