Godfried Toussaint

Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow
Computer Science
McGill University (Canada)

Phylogenetic Analysis of the Musical Rhythms of the World

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Godfried Toussaint is a professor emeritus in the School of Computer Science and a researcher in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. His interests are in discrete and computational geometry and its applications to musicology, music theory, and music technology. For example, he recently discovered that most traditional world musical rhythms are generated by a simple mathematical rule that goes back to Euclid.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Toussaint will analyze the rhythms of traditional world music—using tools from computer science, mathematics, music theory, psychology, and computational biology—to obtain an evolutionary phylogeny of world rhythms. Computational biologists analyze families of DNA molecules by viewing them as sequences of four letters—A, C, G, and T—that represent the four nucleotide bases. Toussaint will analyze musical rhythms in a similar manner, representing them as symbol sequences.

Since earning his PhD at the University of British Columbia, Toussaint has been a professor at McGill, conducting research in information theory, pattern recognition, machine learning, computational geometry, and, more recently, computational music theory. He is the founder or cofounder of annual conferences and workshops on computational geometry and an editor of several journals. His awards include a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts and the David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision and Teaching at McGill. His research on flamenco rhythms has received international media coverage and been the focus of two Canadian television programs.