Saramsha

No. 003  ·  19 September 2026

Wheels Within Wheels

Every ring takes exactly the same time to go round, and divides it a different number of ways. Press play, then try to decide which ring is the beat.

About this piece

Pass the gol-den but-ter

A polyrhythm is two speeds running at once: the same stretch of time cut into three and into four, so neither fits inside the other. The rings here share one revolution. Three beats and four beats meet only at the top of the circle, and in between they never quite agree — which is the whole point.

The maths is small and exact. Three against four needs a grid of twelve to write down; five against four needs twenty. The outer ticks show the resultant: every instant at which anything sounds, counting all the rings together. For three against four that comes out as six uneven taps, and generations of music students have learned it by saying pass the gol-den but-ter at a steady speed.

The strange part is in your head, not on the page. Only one ring at a time can feel like the pulse, and you can choose which — the other one instantly turns into syncopation, and the music seems to change tempo without changing at all. It flips like a Necker cube. Try it: start the three-against-four, tap your foot on the four, then deliberately hear the three as the beat.

Music that lives here: the standard seven-stroke bell pattern of Ewe and Yoruba drumming, which sits over a pulse of four and a pulse of three simultaneously; the son clave of Cuba; tisra against chatusra in Carnatic music, the same tala counted in threes or fours; and the hemiola that Brahms could not leave alone.

Nothing is recorded here — every sound is made by oscillators in your browser as it plays. Nothing leaves the page.