Towards a computational definition of the tresillo rhythm and its tracing in popular music

TL;DR

This paper formalizes the Tresillo rhythm mathematically, develops methods to detect its presence in popular music, and analyzes its usage trends in US Billboard Top 20 songs over two decades.

Contribution

It introduces a formal mathematical definition of the Tresillo rhythm and proposes multiple similarity measures to detect its presence in songs.

Findings

Tresillo rhythm is prevalent in US Billboard Top 20 songs.

The study reveals trends in Tresillo usage over 20 years.

Multiple similarity measures were validated for rhythm detection.

Abstract

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.