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ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. 6/8 time
  2. A (note)
  3. Abc notation
  4. Accidental
  5. Articulation
  6. B (note)
  7. Bar
  8. Beam
  9. Braille Music
  10. Breath mark
  11. Canntaireachd
  12. Chord
  13. Cinquillo
  14. Clef
  15. Coda
  16. Copyist
  17. Da capo
  18. Dal segno
  19. Dotted note
  20. Double whole note
  21. Drum tablature
  22. Dynamics
  23. Eight note
  24. Ekphonetic notation
  25. Fermata
  26. Figured bass
  27. Fingering
  28. Flat
  29. Ghost note
  30. Glissando
  31. Gongche notation
  32. Grace note
  33. Grand staff
  34. Graphic notation
  35. GUIDO music notation
  36. Guido of Arezzo
  37. Halfnote
  38. Harmony
  39. Hundred twenty-eighth note
  40. Italian musical terms used in English
  41. Kepatihan
  42. Key
  43. Keyboard tablature
  44. Key signature
  45. Klavarskribo
  46. Leadsheet
  47. Ledger line
  48. Legato
  49. Letter notation
  50. Ligature
  51. Marcato
  52. Mensural notation
  53. Mensurstriche
  54. Metre
  55. Modern musical symbols
  56. Musical notation
  57. Musical scale
  58. Musical terminology
  59. Music engraving
  60. Music theory
  61. Nashville notation
  62. Natural sign
  63. Neume
  64. Note
  65. Note value
  66. Numbered musical notation
  67. Numerical sight-singing
  68. Octave
  69. Ornament
  70. Parsonscode
  71. Partbook
  72. Pizzicato
  73. Portamento
  74. Prolation
  75. Qinpu
  76. Quarter note
  77. Rastrum
  78. Rehearsal letter
  79. Repeat
  80. Rest
  81. Rhythm
  82. Rythmic mode
  83. Rhythmic notation
  84. Saptak
  85. Scientific pitch notation
  86. Shape note
  87. Sharp
  88. Sheet music
  89. Sixteenth note
  90. Sixty-fourth note
  91. Slash notation
  92. Slur
  93. Sound painting
  94. Staccatissimo
  95. Staccato
  96. Staff
  97. Swung note
  98. Tablature
  99. Tacet
  100. Tempo
  101. Tenuto
  102. Thirty-second note
  103. Tie
  104. Time signature
  105. Time unit box system (TUBS)
  106. Tongan music notation
  107. Triple metre
  108. Tuplet
  109. Unfigured bass
  110. Virtual music score
  111. Vocal score
  112. Whole note
  113. Znamennoe singing
 



MUSICAL NOTATION
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_%28music%29

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Metre (music)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Metre or meter (US) is the measurement of a musical line into measures of stressed and unstressed "beats", indicated in Western music notation by a symbol called a time signature. Properly, "metre" describes the whole concept of measuring rhythmic units, but it can also be used as a specific descriptor for a measurement of an individual piece as represented by the time signature—for example, "This piece is in 4/4 metre " is equivalent to "This piece is in 4/4 time" or "This piece has a 4/4 time signature".

Metre is an entrainment, a representation of changing aspects of music as patterns of temporal invariance, allowing listeners to synchronize their perception, cognition, and behaviour with musical rhythms. Rhythm is distinguished from metre in that rhythms are patterns of duration while "metre involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time" (London 2004, p.4-5).

Ametric music includes chant, some graphically scored works since the 1950s, and non-European folk music such as honkyoku repertoire for shakuhachi (Karpinski 2000, p.19).

Rhythmic metre

There are four different time signatures in common use:

  • Simple duple (ex. 4/4)
  • Simple triple (ex.3/4 )
  • Compound duple (ex. 6/8)
  • Compound triple (ex. 9/8)

If each beat in a measure is divided into two parts, it is simple metre, and if divided into three it is compound. If each measure is divided into two beats, it is duple metre, and if three it is triple. Some people also label quadruple, while some consider it as two duples. The latter is more consistent with the above labelling system, as any other division above triple, such as quintuple, is considered as duple+triple (12123) or triple+duple (12312), depending on the accents in the musical example. However, in some music a quintuple may be treated and perceived as one unit of five, especially at faster tempos.

The piano intro to "Take Five", a jazz composition in 5/4, note that the rhythm suggests a 12312 division – Listen to this piece
The piano intro to "Take Five", a jazz composition in 5/4, note that the rhythm suggests a 12312 division – Listen to this piece

"Once a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present" (Lester 1986, p.77). Duple time is far more common than triple (Krebs 2005, p.16). Most popular music is in 4/4 time, though often may be in 2/2 or cut time such as in bossa nova. Doo-wop and some other rock styles are frequently in 12/8, or may be interpreted as 4/4 with heavy swing. Similarly, most classical music before the 20th century tended to stick to relatively straightforward metres such as 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8, though variations on these such as 3/2 and 6/4 are also found. By the 20th century, composers were using less regular metres, such as 5/4 and 7/8.

Also in the 20th century, it became relatively more common to switch metre frequently—the end of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a particularly extreme example—and the use of asymmetrical rhythms where each beat is a different length became more common: such metres include already discussed quintuple rhythms as well as more complex constructs along the lines of 2+5+3/4 time, where each bar has a 2-beat unit, a 5-beat unit, and a 3-beat unit, with a stress at the beginning of each unit; similar metres are used in various folk musics. Other music has no metre at all (free time) (such as drone-based music as exemplified by La Monte Young), features rhythms so complex that any metre is obscured (such as in serialism), or is based on additive rhythms (such as some music by Philip Glass).

Metre is often combined with a rhythmic pattern to produce a particular style. This is true of dance music, such as the waltz or tango, which have particular patterns of emphasizing beats which are instantly recognizable. This is often done to make the music coincide with slow or fast steps in the dance, and can be thought of as the musical equivalent of prosody. Sometimes, a particular musician or composition becomes identified with a particular metric pattern; such is the case with the so-called Bo Diddley beat. Some examples (Scruton 1997):

March rhythms
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March rhythms
Polka rhythms
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Polka rhythms
Siciliano rhythms
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Siciliano rhythms
Waltz rhythms
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Waltz rhythms

Polymetre

Polymetre is the use of two metric frameworks simultaneously, or in regular alternation. Examples include Béla Bartók's "Second String Quartet". Leonard Bernstein's "America" (from West Side Story) employs alternating measures of 6/8 (compound duple) and 3/4 (simple triple). This gives a strong sense of two, followed by three, stresses (indicated in bold type): // I-like-to be-in-A // ME RI CA//.

An example from the rock canon is "Kashmir" by the seminal British hard-rock quartet Led Zeppelin, in which the percussion articulates 4/4 while the melodic instruments present a riff in 3/4. In "Toads Of The Short Forest" (from the album Weasels Ripped My Flesh), composer Frank Zappa explains: "At this very moment on stage we have drummer A playing in 7/8, drummer B playing in 3/4, the bass playing in 3/4, the organ playing in 5/8, the tambourine playing in 3/4, and the alto sax blowing his nose." The math metal band Meshuggah uses complex polymetres even more extensively; typically the songs are constructed in 4/4, with guitar riffing and bass drum patterns in unusual metres such as 11/8 and 23/16. Usually the riffs are forced to resolve after 4 or 8 measures resulting in a shorter 'fitpiece' which has a different metre from the rest of the section.

Perceptually there appears to be little or no basis for polymetre as research shows that listeners either extract a composite pattern that is fitted to a metric framework, or focus on one rhythmic stream while treating others as "noise". This upholds the tenet that "the figure-ground dichotomy is fundamental to all perception" (Boring 1942, p.253), (London 2004, p.49-50).

Metric structure

Metric structure includes metre, tempo, and all rhythmic aspects which produce temporal regularity or structure, against which the foreground details or durational patterns are projected (Wittlich 1975, chap. 3).

Rhythmic units can be metric, intrametric, contrametric, or extrametric.

Metric levels may be distinguished. The beat level is the metric level at which pulses are heard as the basic time unit of the piece. Faster levels are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels (Wittlich 1975, chap. 3).

Level of Meter shown to be a spurious concept, since Meter arises from the interaction of two levels of motion, the faster of which provides the pulses, and the slower of which which organizes them in repetitive conceptual groups. (Yeston, 1976)

Hypermetre is large-scale metre (as opposed to surface-level metre) created by hypermeasures which consist of hyperbeats (Stein 2005, p.329). The term was coined by Cone (1968) while London (2004, p.19) asserts that there is no perceptual distinction between metre and hypermetre.

A metric modulation is a modulation from one metric unit or metre to another.

Deep structure

C. S. Lee (1985) has described musical metre in terms of deep structure, where, through rewrite rules, different metres (4/4, 3/4, etc) generate many different surface rhythms. For example the first phrase of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, without the syncopation, may be generated from its metre of 4/4:

    4/4                 4/4            4/4   /    \              /    \         /    \2/4      2/4        2/4      2/4   2/4      2/4 |      /    \       |        |     |          \ |   1/4      1/4    |        |     |           \ |  /   \    /   \   |        |     | | 1/8 1/8  1/8 1/8  |        |     | | |     |  |     |  |        |     |       It's been  a  hard     day's night(Middleton 1990, p.211).

Examples of various metre sound samples

  1. sample of how 1/4 metre sounds in a tempo of 90bpm.
  2. sample of how 2/4 metre sounds in a tempo of 90bpm.
  3. sample of how 3/4 metre sounds in a tempo of 90bpm.
  4. sample of how 4/4 metre sounds in a tempo of 90bpm.
  5. sample of how 5/8 metre sounds in a tempo of 120bpm.

Metre in song

Issues involving metre in song reflect a combination of musical metre and poetic metre, especially when the song is in a standard verse form. Traditional and popular songs fall heavily within a limited range of metres, leading to a fair amount of interchangeability. For example, early hymnals commonly did not include musical notation, but simply texts. The text could be sung to any tune known by the singers that had a matching metre, and the tune chosen for a particular text might vary from one occasion to another.

One case that illustrates the potential use of this principle across musical genres is The Blind Boys of Alabama's rendition of the hymn Amazing Grace, which is sung to the musical setting made famous by The Animals in their version of the folk song The House of the Rising Sun.

Sources

  • Karpinski, Gary S. (2000). Aural Skills Acquisition : The Development of Listening, Reading, and Performing Skills in College-Level Musicians. ISBN 0-19-511785-9.
  • Krebs, Harald (2005). “Hypermeter and Hypermetric Irregularity in the Songs of Josephine Lang.”, in Deborah Stein (ed.), Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517010-5.
  • Honing, Henkjan (2002) Structure and interpretation of rhythm and timing, Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie. 7(3), 227-232.[ http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/papers/honing-2002.pdf pdf]
  • London, Justin (2004). Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516081-9.
  • Lester, Joel (1986). The Rhythms of Tonal Music. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-1282-4.
  • Scruton, Roger (1997). The Aesthetics of Music, p.25ex2.6. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-816638-9.
  • Wittlich, Gary E. (ed.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-century Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
  • Maury Yeston , 1976 The Stratification of Musical Rhythm, Yale University Press, New Haven

See also

  • Wazn
  • Tala
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