the beat makes a difference

The idea of a beat (or a "tactus") -- that is some regularly recurring accent that sets up a meter -- is interesting. Without such an accent or focal point there's no way of telling where the downbeat is needless to say, which means, consequently that determining where any given rhythmic pattern starts and ends is made impossible. Take the following rhythm which recurs ad infinitum:

Without a downbeat there's no real way to distinguish what the rhythm really is. For instance any of the 3 notes could be thought of as beginning the pattern:

Which would produce the following (the gray area encloses the same notes which look different due to beaming).
Actually one good benefit of this is that if you can play the first one you can play all of them (for me #2 was always very, very hard to play...it's not!).