Puerto Rican icon Bad Bunny, a superstar rapper, has recently risen to global prominence as demonstrated by the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.
Bad Bunny’s success is not only down to his charismatic performances or engagement in social activism for Puerto Rico, but also his catchy use of rhythm.
He infuses the characteristic rhythms of reggaeton into Latin trap, creating his signature sound.
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Rhythm can be defined as the musical duration or timing properties of music. Many rhythms derive from human speech patterns and are also linked to movement, including dance (as suggested by numerous studies on embodiment).
The “catchiness” of a rhythm has the potential to make or break a song. And it’s not just in recent pop songs, but across classical, jazz and throughout global musical styles.
(AP Photo/Adam Gray)
Rhythm in music
Rhythm is one of the key parameters of music alongside pitch and timbre, which is the quality of auditory sensations produced by the tone of a sound wave.
As 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky scribbled on his sketches of his rhythmic masterpiece, The Rite of Spring: “there is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.”
What makes a rhythm distinctive or catchy? The answer lies in the pattern that underlies the structure. Much of human creativity beyond rhythm and music is also shaped by the math underneath the patterns.
The tresillo
Bad Bunny’s characteristic reggaeton rhythms are derived from what is called the tresillo, a distinctive pattern created by two groups of three beats followed by a group of two beats. It’s especially associated with African and Caribbean music.
(Open Music Theory), CC BY
The tresillo is found across an array of music from all over the globe including tango, jazz, reggaeton and bossa nova.
The tresillo was first made famous through the West in a song from an 1875 opera, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (“Love is a rebellious bird”), usually called “The Habanera.” And it has since been widely circulated in varied ways through popular culture.
Carmen was set in what dominant French society at the time viewed as an “exotic” and culturally distant south of Spain. To emphasize this cultural difference, Bizet was keen to introduce what scholars have termed “local colour” through the use of an apparent folk tune, which became “The Habanera.”
However, little did the composer know that “The Habanera” was not a folk tune and was actually a recent popular song by Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier. Certainly, this use of the tresillo was part of what made Bizet’s aria, and Yradier’s song, so catchy.
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“The Habanera” is not only the name of this composition but also of a genre of a musical dance. It first appeared in 1700s-era Cuba, where it grew out of an English country dance that was then infused with elements from French, Spanish and African traditions, which eventually led to the dance being characterized by the tresillo rhythm.
This shows how the tresillo is a product of cross-cultural transfer.
‘Maximal evenness’
The tresillo consists of a “three-three-two” pattern across eight beats. The three attacks are distributed evenly across those eight beats, but not perfectly so.
The tresillo is a classic example of a larger class of “maximally even” rhythms. An arrangement is “maximally even” if the elements are spread out as much as possible in a given unit. With the tresillo, the “imperfect” arrangement often makes these “maximally even” rhythms sounds both simple yet catchy.
Many other maximally even rhythms are constructed in similar manner with alternating rhythmic durations that are spread out as much possible in the space that they have.
This is usually achieved by having two and three beats grouped together that alternate and create a somewhat irregular feel, but is widely popular and found across the globe in many musical genres and cultures including jazz, African drumming patterns, Indian classical music and more recent western classical music.
In addition to Bad Bunny’s tresillos, another well-known example of maximally even rhythms appears in Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” from their album Amnesiac (2001). The title alludes to the ambiguous, much debated yet mesmerizing rhythms created through irregular beats that reference the geometric structure of a pyramid.
Radiohead had already used this rhythm in their earlier 2000 hit “Everything in its right place,” making maximally even rhythms a key part of their signature sound.
Maximally even arrangements also appear in nature — for example in the arrangement of magnetic particles in physics.
Perceiving rhythm
The concept of maximal evenness also affects how our brains perceive rhythms. When hearing a rhythm, the human mind is sensitive to the relations of time intervals between notes (for example, the hits of a drum) within the rhythm.
Specifically, our brains try to find a repeating pattern of regularities to organize the rhythm at different time scales. Regular, simple rhythmic patterns are more likely to be remembered.
Early research on rhythm perception has found that study participants memorized and reproduced rhythms more accurately when the time intervals between notes have simple relations such as two to one, or one to one.
For more complex patterns where the intervals are related by other ratios larger or smaller than two to one, participants often reproduced these patterns as though they were closer to two to one (or one to one).
More recent research also found similar advantage for rhythms with simpler ratios of time intervals between notes to be more easily remembered and reproduced by people. Researchers found this “rhythmic bias” for simple ratios exists across different cultures, though the exact ratio people prefer varies across cultural groups.
As we have seen, catchy rhythms like the tresillo could be explained by principles such as “maximal evenness” and human perception.
From Bad Bunny to Bizet, Radiohead and far beyond, artists appeal to these shared principles and patterns, and these catchy rhythms connect people across cultures, languages and generations.
Catchy rhythms like the tresillo are examples of how our musical perception and preference negotiate between simplicity and complexity, between predictability and unpredictability.
