Hear the rhythm. Rebuild it from memory.
Each day, Clave Koan plays one of the world's great rhythm timelines. Place its strikes on a circle of pulses and find it in six tries. A few minutes a day trains your ear on the patterns under salsa, Afro house, reggaeton, samba and techno.
How it works
Four moves, about five minutes.
1. Listen.
The rhythm plays on a clave over a soft pulse. The brighter tick marks the 1.
2. Place.
Tap the circle to set a strike on each pulse you hear. The game tells you how many strikes to find.
3. Strike.
Lock in your guess. Gold means a strike is in place. Amber means it's one pulse off. You have six strikes.
4. Turn.
If you have the right shape but the wrong starting point, the game tells you. Rotate the whole circle until it lands.
Solve it and the koan opens: the rhythm's name, where it comes from, its interval pattern, and how producers use it in the studio.
Why it works
A rhythm is a shape before it is a sound. Clave Koan teaches you to hear the shape.
The necklace. The mathematician Godfried Toussaint drew rhythms as beads on a circle. Connect the strikes and every timeline becomes a polygon you can see. Two rhythms that look unrelated on a grid often turn out to be the same necklace, entered from a different bead. Son clave 3-2 and 2-3 are one shape. So are shiko and the Egyptian maqsum.
Evenness. Many of the most durable rhythms on earth spread their strikes as evenly as the cycle allows. The tresillo, the bossa nova clave and the bembé bell all do. Every reveal tells you whether the rhythm you just solved is one of them.
Distance, not counting. The hints teach intervals. After two misses you get the set of distances between strikes. After four you get their order. You stop counting "one-e-and-a" and start hearing the gaps.
Ear first. You don't need to read music. Box notation fills in under the circle as you play, so the written form arrives after the sound, the way it does in oral traditions.
Go deeper with the Rhythm Gooderizer.
Clave Koan trains your ear on the timelines. The Rhythm Gooderizer turns them into grooves you can use in your sessions.