This repository contains a Python project on analysing rhythmic patterns in maracatu using Music21 for the course "Computational Methods in Ethnomusicology" by Rafael Caro Repetto, Ph.D. at the Kunstuniversität Graz.

The Brazilian style of percussion music maracatu de baque virado is characterized by a prominent feature of its traditional rhythmic patterns, namely an accentuation of off-beat rather than on-beat notes as that is the case for other Brazilian percussion styles like samba or even most other genres around the world. During this experiment, transcriptions of the rhythmic patterns of the Austrian group Maracatu Renascente are analysed by using the Python toolkit Music21 to find out what the concrete ratio between the elements of maracatu rhythm patterns, especially the ratio of accented on-beat and off-beat notes, actually is.

This repository contains the Jupyter notebook Maracatu_Pattern_Analysis.ipynb, which itself contains the program code and further explanations. The data can be found in the directory maracatu_patterns/ that contains the dataset, i. e. the MusicXML-files for the analysis, and the MuseScore- and the PDF-files of the patterns.

The modules in requirements.txt need to be installed via pip install -r requirements.txt, otherwise the program will produce an error. Furthermore, if the repository is downloaded, the directory maracatu_patterns must remain in the same place as the Jupyter notebook, otherwise the path will be incorrect and the program will produce another error.