Ever wonder how to play a 3:4:5:6 polyrhythm? Well, here you go:
Those are the kinds of questions people ask at music.stack.exchange, where I’ve been visiting recently. It’s somewhat refreshingly fact oriented— it’s heavily moderated against opinion/discussion oriented questions/answers— though I think it’s used by a lot of computer people, so some of the questions are silly, like “how do I play a 3:4:5:6 polyrhythm.”
How we arrived at the above thing was to figure the lowest common denominator of those four numbers, which it turns out is 60. So we need a musical measure or phrase that can be subdivided into sixty notes. Could be fifteen beats of 16th notes, ten beats of sixtuplets, or, worse, twenty beats of triplets, or twelve beats of quintuplets.
The fifteen beats of 16ths would be easiest for most people, and we can write it out in nice friendly 3/4 time. You then have to figure out what rhythm to write for each part to give you three, four, five, and six notes over the entire phrase.
The question is so stupid I initially figured it out wrong:
…which is actually how long it takes for notes of three, four, five and six 16ths duration to resolve. 10:12:15:20, if you want to express it as a polyrhythm. I blame the questioner for the error.
So, a person really serious about doing this to the people they play with should work it out in all of the above subdivisions. Or just play any old janky noise, because that’s what it sounds like. You get no credit for statistical achievements.