Wikidata Rhythmic Improvisations
Lucas Werkmeister, .
The Wikidata logo consists mainly of a barcode spelling out the word WIKI
in Morse:
I was wondering if you could convert that into some musical rhythm, and it turns out that if you take each wide bar as a quarter note, each thin bar as an eighth note, and each gap as an eighth rest, you end up with a rhythm that’s twelve quarter notes long –
– and distributes quite nicely across either three 4/4-time bars –
– or two 6/4-time bars, which in my opinion makes more sense both musically and when looking at the logo image:
(The source code for all three images is wikidata.ly.)
It’s not a full composition, and I haven’t really internalized the rhythm yet, but still I think it’s rather pretty, and a bit catchy. The recording above is just what I made of it, but you could obviously apply this rhythm it a lot of different ways.
(I have to admit that my interpretation, specifically the C-D-G-C chord I used at the beginning and end, is influenced a bit by The First Circle, because I’ll be honest – I don’t know too many compositions that aren’t in 4/4 or 3/4 time. That’s probably also why I dropped a note and lapsed into 5/4 time a few times – sorry.)