Plenty of the world's drumming does not count in fours. Bulgarian and Turkish dance music limps: the aksak meters group a fast pulse into twos and threes, so a bar of seven goes 2+2+3 and the long step falls at the end. A Hindustani tala is counted in claps and waves, and Jhaptal's ten beats are clapped on 1, 3 and 8, with a wave of the hand, the khali, on 6. The Arabic maqsum is two dums and three teks. RUDE now has an entry for each, written so that the loop is a whole number of beats: the aksak bars play twice, the second time from the other hand.
Film composers are sometimes asked for the music of people who do not exist. For Avatar, James Horner worked with the ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant, who drafted a musical culture for the Na'vi: what they sing, what they make instruments from, where music sits in their lives. For Dune, Hans Zimmer asked his players to invent instruments that do not exist; for Part Two, Pedro Eustache invented a chromatic duduk, and Loire Cotler's wordless voice draws on konnakol, jazz scat, overtone singing and vocal percussion. Close Encounters of the Third Kind kept its alien music small. Its greeting is five notes because Spielberg wanted a short greeting, and John Williams wrote some 350 five-note candidates. Marc Okrand gave Klingon music a nine-tone scale, and one blog series has built a theory on it.
None of these accounts says how an alien drummer would count, so RUDE's new Xeno family makes some rhythms by rule.
- Fibonacci word. It grows by replacing each R with RL and each L with R. Carried on forever, it never repeats; RUDE loops its first 21 strokes, 13 R to 8 L.
- Thue-Morse. A step goes to L when its number, written in binary, has an odd count of 1s, and to R otherwise. Even looped, no figure shorter than the loop plays three times running.
- E(8, 13). It spreads 8 onsets over 13 steps; 8 and 13 are consecutive Fibonacci numbers, so their ratio is close to the golden ratio.
- Prime Pulses. It strikes on the steps whose numbers are prime, counting the first step as 0, up to 29.
- Nine-Step Cycle. It counts 4 + 5, and it is invented: Okrand gave the Klingons nine tones and nothing about their rhythm, so this is a guess at what nine would sound like on a drum.
The plugin's tests and the page build check every rule against the notes RUDE actually plays. The patterns are drawn in the RUDE research note, section 07, and on plate IV of the PDF.