Clave patterns in Uruguayan Candombe drumming

Abstract

Uruguayan Candombe drumming has deep African roots, and like other musics of the Afro–Atlantic world, its rhythm is timeline–based. The timeline pattern of Candombe, called madera, has many traits in common with similar patterns in Afro–American music, like the son clave. It presents, however, significant differences with the more common uses of timeline patterns in other musics of the same tradition. For instance, instead of a single timeline pattern as in other Afro–Latin–American musics, the madera pattern allows for different variants. In this paper, Music Information Retrieval techniques are applied to a dataset of Candombe recordings in order to analyse the characteristics of the madera pattern, and group and classify its most recurrent variations