Okay, I took orchestra in school. I learned to play, and we did study this stuff, but it hasn’t really sunk in. (I wasn’t particularly good at reading music.)
Please help me understand time signatures in music.
I know that, for example, 4/4 represents 4 beats per measure, where the beat is on the quarter note.
3/4 would be three beats per measure, beat on the quarter note.
7/8 would be seven beats per measure, with the beat on the eighth note.
The numbers, either above or below, have nothing to do with the speed of the music. They only help to define how many blobs of ink you put into an arbitarily-sized stretch of sheet music; this is called a measure. Measures are separated by bar lines. The more blobs there are, the the bigger the numbers are.
Originally, when people first started writing music out, they didn’t divide the sheet music up into measures. They just wrote down blobs of ink and everybody just sang one note after the other without worrying about where the bar lines were, because bar lines hadn’t been invented yet. They made different-sized and different-shaped blobs of ink, with different types of lines attached to them, to try to come up with some standard way of saying “okay, these notes are half as long as those notes over there”.
One day, somebody decided he was going to mess with things and invented bar lines. Perhaps because he was writing dance music; perhaps because he was using an advanced printing press and needed to have pre-defined chunks of music in a pre-defined width of print. In any case, suddenly we have a chunk of music called a measure, and there are a bunch of these measures in any given song or dance.
Each measure (until we get to the 18th century or so, or unless you look at music from the Middle Ages that they’re trying to put into modern notation but don’t get distracted by that…) is pretty much the same duration. Since they’re all the same duration, and they probably have about the same number of notes in them, and since dance music and music for the masses tends to have a staggeringly simple beat pattern, they were able to define time signatures as you listed them above: the top number is how many “beats” there are per measure (usually) and the bottom number is the size of note that gets one of those beats. So, 3/4 means three beats per measure, and a 1/4 note gets one of those beats. 15/1 means fifteen beats per measure, and a 1/1 (or whole) note gets one of those beats.
People ask why this is so complicated, and the simple fact is that we’re trying to come up with one simple set of rules that fits onto one piece of paper that encompasses all of the ways of doing something that people had been doing, as an oral (aural) tradition for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. We’ve had cars for less than 150 years; imagine if your driver’s handbook was one page long, but they still managed to get most of the rules of the road on it.
Oh man. Just . . . I don’t know man, I just don’t know . . .
ETA: OK, a substantive response. Rhythm is something you feel more than you learn about. Maybe try to think about why it feels different to clap the way the person did in your quote versus how it feels to clap your way.
The tune I know for “This Little Light of Mine” is exactly as Irishman has it. Perhaps it could be illustrated with a couple of other well-known songs? This one obviously has variety. The version I know is more country than gospel.
Also, I’ve read both threads, and can read music, and I know what a back beat is, but I still don’t understand time signatures. What’s the practical difference between 2/2 and 4/4 and 8/8? (I’ve never seen 8/8, but if you can have 7/8 it must exist in theory.)
The practical difference is that 2/2 has a single downbeat, while 4/4 has a downbeat and smaller downbeat halfway through the measure.
So you would count 2/2 as ONE-two, ONE-two, ONE-two,
And you count 4/4 as ONE two THREE four, ONE two THREE four, ONE two THREE four.
In terms of note arithmetic, it makes no difference; you have the same amount of note durations per measure. But the rhythm of a 2/2 song is different from a 4/4 song because of the strength of the downbeats.
High-falutin’, wine-sipping musicologists will go on at great lengths about the differences.
Fortunately, I’m not one of those guys. There’s no audible difference. You can write something out in all three time signatures, hand it to some musicians, record it, and it will sound exactly the same: N beats per measure, an N note gets the beat. The absolutely only difference is how much ink you have to use to print the notes. This is the point where a musicologist would step in and say “yes, but to print it out in 2/2, you’d have to use twice as many measures as 4/4, or four times as many measures as 8/8, so the chances of an excessively strong first beat in each measure might throw the rhythm off.” Unless, of course, you tell the musicians not to do that.
However… from the point of readability, 4/4 is called “common time” for a reason: it is used all the time, and any musician can read it without having to make any adjustments. I’ve known musicians who couldn’t read music in 2/2 because they weren’t used to that many measures, and they were scared of 8/8 because they weren’t used to that many eighth notes and thought it would be too fast. Too much ink, too little ink, didn’t matter, it wasn’t what they were used to, so we had to play stuff in the more standard time signatures.
Part of the goal is to convey the most information with the least blobs of ink, towads which certain things are assumed, or presented once at the top and understood to cont unless changed. mathematically, 2/2 and 4/4 are the same, and you could write one piece out in the others time sig, but it’ll be messy and harder to read. Marches, for example are usually written in 2/2 and have a one two, left right feel to them.
Ethilrist & friedo, that really helps. The impression I’m getting is that the number on the top is the grouping of strong beats every second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, or whatevereth note, and the bottom number is basically either four or not four.
OK. Let’s try “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” (just the very first part).
The irishman way to clap is on the bolded parts:
Michael row your boat ashore, Ha–lee–looooooooooo–yah.
Here’s the back-beat, gospelly, soully way to clap:
Michael row** clap** your boat a-clapshore, clap
Ha–lee–looooooooooo–yah.clap
It just sounds better the second way (to my ears, of course, since “better” is of course subjective).
The first way is how you’d expect your grandma or the audience of the Grand Ole Opry to clap. The second ways is how you’d expect a musical teenager or the audience at Showtime at the Appollo to clap.
I would disagree a little with some the what has gone before. There are audible differences between 2/2 ad 4/4, but it is subtle. And it depends upon the style of music. Over time there have been implicit assumptions built into the signature that are not conveyed by a simple analysis based upon just the number of beats per measure. By default a classical musician knows that 4/4 is played strong weak medium weak, and that will sound different to two bars of 2/2, which would be strong weak, strong weak. But you can’t know this from the notation alone. Worse, a jazz or blues musician will play on the backbeat, weak strong, weak strong, and jazz or blues played on the beat will sound remarkably dull. Rock and roll derived from blues similarly, however this is less clear as pure Rock verging into metal and the like starts to acquire classical and baroque influences.
None of this is captured in the time signature. Compound times are similar. In addition to the simple element of how the bar is counted, there is implicit understanding, from context, that the manner in which the accents are applied is known by the performer. Some of this stems from the physical nature of instruments too. Some instruments are more adapted to even time, and to a natural placement of the accents with different time signatures. Bowed instruments especially. Really messy time signatures have no well understood accent structure, and may require specific additional direction or interpretation. What is critical and conveyed by the signature is that the bar is the repeating element of the accent structure. Once you have the accent structure this will have direct control of the melodic form.
That’s very interesting, Ethilrist. Can you recommend a book on the way western music developed? Preferably one as easy to understand as your brief explanation above.
Something that’s sort of been hinted at so far is that in general, beats are divided into groups of two or three. They might then be grouped into larger groups, but the natural feel of rhythm is in twos and threes. That doesn’t mean that everything could be written in low-numbered time signatures. The time signature signifies what the equal, repeated divisions are like.
For instance, typical 4/4 has the first beat, the weak second beat, a somewhat stronger third beat, and then the weak fourth beat. Beats 1 & 2 fit together as a unit, and beats 3 & 4 fit together - two groups of two, each a bit different. If you wanted each group of two to feel the same, you’d write it in 2/4 (or possibly 2/2, depending on the style).
This explains why there’s been mention of 5/4 being divided up ‘1-2-3 1-2’ or some other way (though that’s a pretty common division) or why 6/8 is two groups of three.
That’s because the example you were given was not clapping beats. It was clapping backbeats, which is a type of syncopation, where the accent is on a different place than the regular beat (aka downbeat).
Syncopation is used to add a different sort of rhythmic feel, usually referred to as a black feel. Seeing as “This Little Light of Mine” is a Gospel song, it usually sung in this manner. Listen to this video.
Also, none of this has anything to do with what time signature it is in. It’s still in the typical 4/4.
Why is it not " 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 "? What does the off counting get rhythmically?
