I hesitate to be contrarian because I don't want to discourage what I perceive to be an innocent enough exploratory effort by curious and creative students... b

I hesitate to be contrarian because I don't want to discourage what I perceive to be an innocent enough exploratory effort by curious and creative students... but as a long time drummer and computer scientist, this document was underwhelming and surprisingly unscientific (I guess my expectations were set high once I saw the mit.edu domain). A related idea that may be interesting to explore are approaches to identify and classify hip-hop beat cliches across different genres and time periods (and accordingly to generate new beats that approximate the respective genres or time periods' aesthetics).