Towards a computational definition of the tresillo rhythm and its tracing in popular music
This work addresses the need for computational methods to analyze rhythmic patterns in music, specifically for musicologists and data analysts, but it is incremental as it applies existing similarity techniques to a new rhythm definition.
The paper tackles the problem of defining and detecting the Tresillo rhythm in popular music, resulting in an empirical study that traces its usage in the US Billboard Top 20 Charts from 1999 to 2019, with similarity measures used to quantify its presence.
This paper discusses the use and popularity of a rhythm, which henceforth is referred to as "Tresillo rhythm". We first define and formalizes the Tresillo rhythm. Given a mathematical representation of the rhythm, it is then traced in the US Billboard Top 20 Charts of the last 20 years. To detect and determine the use of this rhythm in a song, we compute the similarity of a song with this rhythm. The calculated similarity, then indicates how similar the rhythm of a pop song is compared to the prior defined Tresillo rhythm. To assert and cross-validate the computer rhythm similarity, two different formalizations of the Tresillo rhythm have been compiled and several different approaches to calculated rhythm similarities have been tested and compared. This similarity measure is then used to do an empirical study on the usage of the Tresillo rhythm in the US Billboard Top 20 Charts of the past 20 years (1999-2019). Finally, we argue about some of the possible reasons for the observed trend.