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The prosodic rhythm is a concept mentioned by authors like Leonard Meyer and Fred Lerdahl, which refers to the gestural rhythms that make up a significant portion of the music we listen to, sing, and whistle. These rhythms are formed by elements with well-defined articulation, organized in a hierarchical manner. In other words, there is always a sound or note that stands out as the main element around which the others revolve. These are the rhythms of spoken or sung words – which are divided into stressed and unstressed syllables.

The specific structures formed by prosodic rhythms are called rhythmic profiles. Each profile constitutes a class of potential real rhythms, which display a set of common relationships that can be studied and classified.

Distinct gestures such as, for example, the motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the opening gesture of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat, or the first gesture of the “Odeon” Brazilian choro, share a common characteristic – the strongest and longest note is located at the end of the gesture, and the upbeat forms a structure with three notes of equal durations, with a weak-Strong-weak profile. We say that this phrase as a whole is iambic (weak-Strong), with the weak part subdivided into an amphibrachic structure (weak-Strong-weak). This profile is encoded as [b1], where the letter b represents the subdivided structure (weak-Strong-weak) located in the weak part of the profile, and the number 1 represents the strong part at the end of the gesture.

In 2019, Pauxy Gentil-Nunes published an article in the Proceedings of the Research Colloquium of PPGM-UFRJ, proposing the formalization of the space composed of all the rhythmic profiles, which he called the rhythmesh. This structure contains 296 rhythmic profiles, each representing a way of organizing rhythmic gestures. A network is formed by the profiles and their adjacency relationships, and it can be used to generate meaning and context for working with prosodic rhythm.

This article has been translated into English and is available on the original article’s webpage. The publication includes not only the full translation but also some editorial notes that update the information to the current state of research.