Generating Rhythmic Permutations with a Fixed Set of Notes

• Jan 19, 2024 - 20:10

Hello. I'm very new to Musescore, all music notation I do is currently by hand. But I'm looking into an issue for someone who's writing a book and is looking for ways to quickly generate different rhythmic permutations given a fixed set of notes. I'm curious if Musescore will be able to achieve what I'm looking for out of the box, but I also have a software engineering background so I'm open to getting my hands dirty with other options if necessary. Let me give you an example, screenshots included.

Let's say I have a set of arpeggios running up the scale 1-3-5-7, then back down it 8-6-4-2, and I have that 8 note figure running through the first, third, and fifth degree of the scale. What I'd like to do is just feed this set of notes to MuseScore, then tell it to generate notation for me in different rhythmic contexts. In the examples below, you can see it in 2/4 with triplet quarter notes; 2/4 with eighth notes; 2/4 with triplet 8th notes; 2/4 with quintuplets, etc. The 8 note sequences are always respected, just the rhythmic structure changes.

My ideal situation is being able to just give muse score various rhythmic templates, e.g., "quintuplets in 2/4" then have it automatically fit the 8 note sequences I give it into those structures. As a bonus, you'll see that the root for each arpeggio is accented, it'd be awesome to be able to generate that as well.

Any leads on where I might look in the app to do this?


Comments

I'm not aware of any template in which you can inject notes and have different tuplets be the result. If this is for a book, then playback isn't needed. Through what I call "smoke and mirrors" it can be done. Otherwise you will need to enter each note, individually. If you are new to notation software I suggest you spend some time in the manual to understand what I'm suggesting. There is always more than one way to do most everything.

  1. Practice first.
  2. Setup a single staff score. Flute will work. In 2/4. You now have 30 some empty measures.
  3. Enter some measures of the sequence you need.
  4. Range select the measures you just created and hit "R" two times. You now have three copies of your note sequence.
  5. Range select the second copy and select the 5/8 time signature from the Time signature palette.
  6. Select the forth note of each 5/8 measure one at a time and select the "Join beams" from the beam palette.
  7. Over the same note, select "Staff text" from the Text palette and change the text to "5".

Do the same for the next section choosing 6/8.

Select the time signatures (except the initial 2/4) and hit "V". After you've done that to all of them, go to View>Show>and uncheck" Show invisible".
You cand delete or add measures as needed.

Attached is an idea of what it might look like. I didn't put in all the 3's and 7's.

Attachment Size
idea.mscz 25.44 KB

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