No comment on the OP, which has been answered fairly thoroughly (and far better than I could accomplish)…I just wanted to mention that reading this thread has buggered up my music listening…now I’m listening to every song with an ear to figuring out the time signature…this is almost as bad as when I was playing Elite Beat Agents and turned every song into a beat pattern in my head…
But if you didn’t have a recording of the song, but were just looking at a piece of sheet music, the time signature would tell you at what rhythm to play the piece.
You can actually have 3 in the bottom part of the time signature. Look up “irrational time signature” and have your head explode. Or look at this fun piece of music.
Tons of music in the modern “classical” repertoire are unmetered.
Yeah, I know, but that’s kind of like bringing up i in a third grade arithmetic lesson.
Yeah. I’m pretty good reading and playing odd time signatures, but I quite haven’t wrapped my head around irrational meters yet.
Well there would be six beats. There could be more than six notes, or fewer. The notes wouldn’t necessarily have to land on the beats, in fact it would be odd if they all did.
I use a piece of software called Band In A Box to generate backing tracks. It is all well and good, but it only supports 3/4 and 4/4 rhythms, which frustrated me no end (I score the melodies in another piece of software which is far more flexible). So for 6/8, I find a rhythm that is 4/4 with a triplet feel (i.e three notes every two beats), and run the correctly scored melody through a midi stretch tool that increases every note by 4/3, then they combine fine. Took me ages to work that one out, though.
Songs with really odd time signatures (like 7/4) can often be treated as alternating 4/4 and 3/4 measures. But not always.
Si
If you’ve ever done step aerobics, you’ll know 4/4 songs because the instructor will start the pattern on the 1st note and end on the 4th to make for easy repetition. If you try to do it with an odd sequence, it’ll feel all wrong.
Sorry, you’re right. I got 6/4 & 3/2 confused. Although I would say there’s a good quantity of 6/8 music that would not be written as 6/4, and vice versa. That doesn’t go against Hilary N. Suze’s original point, however.
When you were listening to music then, did you tend to skip back on songs because your hands were in the way? 
I’m a tap dancer, and tap dancers need a beat. Usually a time-step is done to 4/4 time. If it’s a slow 4/4, the movements of the dance are doubled to stay with the beat.
A time step for 3/4 time is called a waltz clog, and instead of going ONE two three four ONE two three four it goes ONE two three ONE two three.
Once, for fun, my dance teacher came up with a time step for 5/4 time. Mayhem in the studio! But we learned it, eventually.
There is also a 6-count swing step, which also is usually done to 4/4 time, but the step itself takes a measure and a half, so half the steps aren’t starting with the beginning measure.
You can tell that most popular music has a beat because people are tapping their feet, nodding their heads, etc. In the words of Count Basie, “If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.”
Hilarity–who taps her feet to Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance” but not necessarily on the beat
Simplified answer:
When we first started dividing notes, we divided the octave into 7 notes, each with a letter name. The actual pattern of notes was uneven. Some people wanted to the exact same song, but start on a different pitch. In order to keep the pattern the same, some notes had to be raised or lowered. We found out that, with a total of 12 notes to an octave, we could play the same pattern starting on any note. Thus, we now had the concept of a key.
Or really simplified: they’re those white or sometimes black rectangles on a piano.
Push them down and music happens.
And if you push them in the right order, it sounds less crappy.
What I’ve always found interesting is that that makes the “-mer-i-ca” sound like a one-bar triplet.
Percy Grainger wrote a lot of stuff in some pretty odd time signatures. Ever try playing something in 2.5/4?
Sting’s “I hung my head” has always intrigued me - I think it’s a 9/8 rhythm, am I right?
Right, but it’s an irregular 9/8, subdivided 2+2+2+3. The “standard” 9/8 is 3+3+3, as in Irish slip jigs.
It pretty much is.
Sounds like you could pretty much treat it as 5/8 and be fine.
I was learning a new piece last year (that for some reason was never performed; they just couldn’t ever seem to get all the ensemble together) which has a constantly shifting meter: 3/4 to 2/4 t 4/4 all the time with no discernible pattern. Then on one page it rapidly goes from 12/16 to 5/16 to 7/16.
A bit of a headache.
I believe “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” was written in 4/4 time, and Madonna (for the Evita movie soundtrack) changed it to 3/4 time for more of a tango rhythm. Compare the Patti Lupone and Madonna versions of the song.
On Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds album there are two songs, Burning Bridges and Mudmen, that have a similar melody played over the same chord pattern but one is in 6/8 and the other a slow 4/4. It gives the songs a totally different feel. The melody of the 6/8 song is 3 sets of 2 per measure but the drums emphasize the first and third beats for a ONE two THREE four five six feel.