The rhythmic organization of music into regularly recurring measures dictated by a time signature.
Questions tagged [meter]
139 questions
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Does Chinese music avoid counting in 4s?
Many East Asian cultures consider the number 4 to be unlucky, because their words for that number are highly homophonic to the word for death. Quite often you will see companies skipping the number 4 in their product numbers to avoid being unlucky…
Cort Ammon
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Why is 3/4 a simple meter while 6/8 is a compound meter?
These two meters sound very much alike to me and they can often be used interchangeably.
For example: it's a trivial thing to change the meter of "An der schönen blaue Donau" from 3/4 to 6/8. Redundant, yes, but the change is perfectly…
Emanuel Landeholm
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Why do you need meter in music?
The music score clearly specifies the length of all notes. So once you know how long a quarter note should last, for example, you already know the tempo and timing of entire score.
So why would you need to specify meter? I understand that the part…
Shital Shah
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Can beats in fractional meters be grouped? If so, are the groups integers or not?
I learned recently that time signatures can be fractional in the top number. For example, 2.5/4 meter.
For normal time signatures, they have integer grouping structures. For example,
4/4 meter has a grouping 1-1-1-1
3/4 meter has a grouping…
Stan Shunpike
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How does one determine the meter of three whole notes per measure?
In beginning piano class we are identifying pitches. The examples are written out as three whole notes per measure. The teacher is counting them out as "one and two and, one and two and, one and two and" for the complete measure. There is no…
Big Steve
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Is there such a thing as back beat hypermeter?
The idea of hypermeter is that there is a metrical structure at the level of the measure. In other words, instead of counting 1–2–3–4 as beats in a measure of 4/4, we can actually count "1" for the first measure, "2" for the second measure, etc., as…
Richard
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Can 15/8 meter be regrouped into 3 beats each with 5 eighth notes? If so, what kind of meter would this be?
Suppose I was in 15/8 meter, so compound quintuple meter. This would be a grouping of 3-3-3-3-3. But suppose instead I wanted to group my meter 5-5-5. This would not be simple or compound. I was under the impression "odd meter" was groups of 2s and…
Stan Shunpike
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Can irrational meters use any positive integer or only certain integers?
As I understand it, an irrational meter is when the bottom number on the time signature is not a power of 2, i.e. 1,2,4,8,16, 32, etc. An example irrational meter that I've seen is 5/24. According to Wikpedia:
Irrational time signatures (rarely,…
Stan Shunpike
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How to identify time signature from notation
I have a fair idea of the meters, and can identify from a time signature whether it is simple or compound, duple, triple, quadruple etc.
However, I cannot figure out the reverse: the time signature from the notes, particularly in the cases that end…
krish
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