Time keeping

I was interested in how steady I could keep a pulse and how obvious the drifting of a pulse would be to a listener. To explore this I recorded a piece of music and used said music to generate some real time visuals to accompany it.

I clicked a pair of drum sticks together along to two bars (eight clicks) of midi click, then the midi click stopped and I tried to continue clicking at the same speed for about ten minutes. I recorded this process eight times.

Interesting rhythms occur as each recording speeds up or slows down. In theory, a similar thing to the '1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters' idea is possible, where if I kept the clicking up for long enough, every rhythm fathomable would be generated. This would not really happen to it's fullest extent because the speed will only drift within a particular margin and so some kind of rhythm with a big gap in the middle would not occur. Slowing the master tempo of the piece could make this a possibility though.

The bars on screen represent each of the eight clicks and whether they are speeding up or slowing down. If a line moves up then the corresponding click has sped up, if a line moves down then the corresponding click has slowed down.