Is 3/4 not just moving the little measure over one beat? What does that accomplish? To me it just means the piece will have more measures, but that A note you were going to hit on the 4th beat will now be 1st in the second measure, but you will still be hitting that note at the same time as far as anyone not reading the music can tell.
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Depending on the kind of music different beats will be emphasized. So listening to 3/4 percussion might be BAM-bam-bam-BAM-bam-bam, whereas with 4/4 it would be BAM-bam-bam-bam-BAM-bam-bam-bam.
It’s all about strong beats versus weak beats. 3/4 has a definite ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three to it.
It’s about the downbeat. The rest of the arrangement is played so you feel the change after 3 beats in 3/4 and 4 beats in 4/4. The percussion might loop around, the chords might change, etc. The body can feel the difference and it affects the way people dance to it
The notes are differently stressed and grouped into “phrases” that fit the meter.
If every note was played with the same emphasis and there was no overall pattern to the “phrases” or “ideas” in the melody, then yes, 3/4 and 4/4 wouldn’t make a difference.
Think of poetry. We usually split it into lines so certain lines rhyme, but we don’t have to. I could write a poem all on the same line, and you could tell how to split it up based on the rhymes and rhythm of the words.
4/4 is “ONE-two-three-four” and 3/4 is “ONE-two-three.”
Yes, the measure will shift, but it will also mean the quarter notes are grouped in 3 instead of 4. This gives the rhythm a fundamentally different feeling as the downbeat happens every 3 beats rather than every 4 (or every 2 as sometimes happens with 4/4)
Piggy backing on this question, then what is the difference between 3/3 and 3/4 time?
Why would a composer choose one over the other?
It seems to be 3 beats before the next bar, both going BAM bam bam.
You’re right that you can write the exact same music in either 4/4 or 3/4 to make all the notes get played at the exact same times. However a time signature is not just about how many beats there are per measure, it also defines things like which beats get emphasis (e.g. 1 and 3 in 4/4) and how long phrases/sections are (since they are usually round numbers of bars).
The “measure” in music is the building block for melody; it’s a marker for when you repeat a pattern, and when you can introduce new patterns.
If you listen to this you can easily count out the four beats in each measure, and easily hear where each measure begins, and it’s always on that four-beats-per-bar pattern.
Now give this a listen. It takes about 8 bars before you’ll really notice it, but it absolutely only has three beats in each measure, before it repeats or introduces new phrases.
edit: for bonus fun, try counting out the beats in this little ditty to see how many there are until the phrase repeats. The bass drum is a little soft, so if you need to wait for the lyrics, start counting at “Climbing”, and then restart at “I could”.
Someone will chime in with a more thorough answer but in a sense you’re not wrong. That being said, you’re overlooking the importance of a downbeat and how that feels. go listen to a song in 3/4. this is basically a ‘feel’ thing. They aren’t the same because each measure has a downbeat. When you listen to that song in 3/4, try to count it in 4/4. Obviously you won’t go out of tempo but you will feel the lack of synchronization, once you experience this should be apparent to you why there is a distinction.
It’s the difference between counting to 3 and restarting your pattern with 3 beats to counting out a loop with 4 beats. Listen to “are you lonesome tonight by elvis” and count along. Then compare to suspicious Minds.
generally speaking, the time signature is the structure of the music. the 1st beat will tend to get stronger emphasis, either through percussion or the general musical flow (i play piano, and even without a percussion there’s a noticeable “pulsing” to music that’s tied to the time signature). in 4/4 time, you may even get a secondary stronger beat on the 3rd beat (using the system u/Cross_22 put in their comment, it’s like BAM-bam-Bam-bam, BAM-bam-Bam-bam).
generally speaking, you cannot just shift that over to 3/4. Go listen to a waltz, for example. It’s very pronounced BAM-bam-bam, BAM-bam-bam (it’s connected directly to how people would dance to that song with the stronger beats being the start of a step sequence). If you took a 4/4 song with a noticable secondary stronger beat and just re-wrote it into 3/4, you’d get a disjointed BAM-bam-Bam, bam-BAM-bam pulse that just doesn’t make sense. If people tried to waltz that they’d trip around. You’d have the bones of a 4/4 song but written down as a 3/4 song instead… you should just write it down in 4/4.
maybe there are some edge cases where you have musical phrasing over twelve beats and you could write it interchangeably between three measures of 4/4 or four measures of 3/4, but that’s not typically the case.
No. The purpose of the time signature is to tell the musician how the different beats sound.
3/4 is played like ONE two three. The strong beat is on the one. This gives the music a distinct rhythm.
4/4 is most usually played with the strongest beat (or emphasized note) on 1 and a slightly weaker one on 3. So it should sound like ONE and Three and… the 2 and 4 beats are the softest (the “and”).
They should sound very different. Music is about notes and tempo and RHYTHM. Don’t forget the rhythm part. Just think about how you speak. Most languages (English included) accents certain syllables and words in a sentence (this is called prosody). This is often how we can tell non-native speakers from native speakers – they get the accents and emphasis wrong even though they pronounce the words properly.
The time signature is a guide to understanding the structure of the music. You can take any music and shoehorn it in to any time signature and if the notes are the same, it’ll sound the same, but it will be much harder for the person reading the music to make sense of it. So when you’re reading the music, the emphasized notes are going to line up in the same part of the measure. Imagine trying to read a book where the words are spaced really weird, going from left to center to right justification. It would be quite hard to read!
Songs in 4/4 have 4 beats per measure. The beat is emphasized (depending on the music) on the 1/3 or the 2/4 beats. Most popular music is in 4/4 so I don’t feel the need to highlight one, but to pick a very 4/4 sounding song, try Wish by Nine Inch Nails, which is 4/4 all the way through and has a very rigid structure, so it’s easy to count.
Songs in 3/4 have 3 beats per measure. The beat is emphasized only on the 1. ONE two three ONE two three
Here’s a video on songs that are in 3/4, which is pretty common:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtvtkwQjDIw
6/8 is mathematically the same as 3/4, but practically speaking, when you have a song in 6/8, it’s telling you that the phrases in the music are going to be six short beats long (8th notes), and typically the emphasis will be on the 1 and the 4. 123456123456
A couple other time signatures, to show you the difference in feel. Excuse the prog rock, but prog rock is often in different time than most music.
This song – Supper’s Off by the Tangent, is in 5/4 (Or 10/8) all the way through. The pattern of the music feels like:
12312312121231231212
If those are 8th notes, the 123123 is 6, and then 1212 is 4 – 10 8th notes. You might feel it in 5, too, as “long long short short”
https://youtu.be/x8Aa5mXa4sc?si=PS0FpfKz0j1e24Z3
Lastly, here’s Pink Floyd’s Money, which is in 7/4:
https://youtu.be/2aW7HweAf3o?si=9on2w45rkBWSbzwy
You can count 12341231234123 on the beats and it’ll line up.
Lastly, here’s a popular song that is in 4/4, but it is literally chopped up in to different time signatures (from a rather complex song that is intended to be unpredictable). It’s kind of funny because the song doesn’t flow and you have no idea what is going to happen next:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFnr0EjtPP4&list=RDcFnr0EjtPP4&start_radio=1
3/4 — 3 notes per bar. They are quarter notes.
4/4 — 4 notes per bar. They are quarter notes.
They are very different.
4/4 goes like “All-i-ga-tor, All-i-ga-tor…”
3/4 goes like, “Croc-o-dile, Croc-o-dile…”
That’s what I told my 5-year-old music students anyway.
Basically, music tends to fall into repeated rhythmic patterns and those patterns usually fall into groups of three or four beats.
Edit: The second 4 in the time signature, the bottom of the fraction, has to do with how the music is written on the page. Most of the time a “quarter note” is what is written for one beat, so you’re actually looking at the bottom half of the fraction “1/4.” It’s a kind of shorthand. “4/4” means “four quarter notes,” or, “four 1/4 notes,” But musicians are lazy and all this stuff used to have to be written with a quill pen so short cuts developed.
Listen to the following two songs and notice how the groove feels:
Tricot – C&C
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNe4Za-amBk
Nirvana – Very Ape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91yrS5PUJBY
Both are at about the same tempo and are influenced by punk/alternative music, so they are comparable. To me, the Nirvana song is a lot more primal and straightforward. Due to the tempos being similar, they should have a similar pace. Due to the former song, the measures repeat quicker. There’s more of an anxious/emotional energy, theres almost a franticness and a mental obligation to repeat over and over.
There’s not an *inherent* reason for 3/4 to feel this way, there’s lots of ways to compose music. But hopefully you notice the different feels. You are free to count when the measures repeat based on the number of beats (every 3 beats vs. every 4 beats), but this is an example of how a 3/4 groove can sound different from a 4/4 groove.
Measures are typically used to indicate a recurring pattern. A composer writing in 3/4 will generally use patterns with a multiple of three beats, while a composer writing in 4/4 will use patterns with a multiple of four beats.
You could write music with the same patterns in either time signature, but it would just be more confusing that way, both for the person transcribing it, and the person reading it.
The important difference is just how the music is felt and where each new measure starts. Time signatures you can kinda think of like a tree, where you have you’re conductor counting quarter notes at a specific bpm, and then the time Signature dictates whether the music flows off the same quarter notes the conductor is counting, or if it’s counted at double speed, ie eighth notes. Then it’s how many quarter notes are in a measure, 3/4 time has a very noticeable 1-2-3 1-2-3 feel vs 4/4 just being 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4
Obviously it can get more complicated than that, mostly with what note the conductor is counting, but thats the basics. Just compare a waltz to a classic rock song
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> but that A note you were going to hit on the 4th beat will now be 1st in the second measure
Well that’d just be writing a 4/4 beat over a 3/4 time signature. That’d not be a 3/4 rythm. It’d be a “real” 3/4 rythm if the first beat was a strong one, but the 4th beat of a 4/4 is (usually) a weak one. (Imagine a bass drum hit being strong, and a snare hit weak, you’d not start a beat playing the snare, you start on with the bass drum)
The first number means the amount of something, the second number means the type of that something.
So 4/4 is not a fraction, it means 4 black notes per measure. 3/4 means 3 black notes per measure. Each black note lasts 1 beat, so 4/4 means 4 breasts per measure.
Let me emphasize, those are not fractions, those are musical notations.
Like you describe, you certainly could transcribe a 4/4 song. The downbeat would be on 1 in the first measure, 2 in the second measure, 3 in the 3rd measure, and then back to 1 in the 5th measure (no downbeat in the 4th measure). The listener wouldn’t no the difference. But sheet music is not for the listener, it’s to guide the musician. A song in 4 is much easier to read when it’s written in 4.
Music in general is made up of repeating patterns. The classic Reggaeton pattern hits the first beat, the “and” of the second beat, the third beat and the fourth beat, and repeats. So when we write that down in sheet music, we use 4/4 because the cycle of the actual music aligns with the cycle of the sheet music written in 4/4. The first 4 is the number of beats. The second 4 is arbitrary – it just indicates which note symbol there are 4 of in a measure.
A waltz, by contrast, has a cycle that’s obviously 3 beats long. So we write it down in 3/4 because it’s easy to read when the cycle of music matches with the cycle of writing.
In 3/4 time, the measures are designed to be grouped in 3s and in 4/4 the music is grouped into fours. I guess you could express 4/4 time in 3/4 but that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of it. Think of the song Pink Floyd’s “Money”. It’s in 7/8: the measures have seven beats. Don’t think of the eighth beat as being moved to the next measure: AIN’T no eighth beat, only seven!
Top number is beats per measure. Bottom number is which note gets the beat, in x/4 time it’s the quarter note. There is no 4 in a measure of 3/4. Time signature is about feel and rhythm. So a waltz (in 3/4) would be very different if written in 4/4.
It affects the “feel” of the song. Music is not just math. It has a physical component in how our body perceives and reacts to it.
3/4 is also the standard for waltzes, whereas 4/4 is the standard for just about most music. The best example, in my opinion, of modern-ish 3/4 is Billy Joel’s Piano Man. That is the flow of a waltz. Save Me by Avenged Sevenfold is also written in 3/4, which I found funny when I discovered that, because it’s a metal/heavy rock song but it has that elegant flow you associate with waltzes.
The 3 means 3 of the notes to a bear, with the 4 indicating which type of note. In this case /4 so quarter notes.
Listen to a piece in 3/4 count along. You’ll notice the difference immediately.
Think y’all forgot what sub you’re in. EXPLAIN LIKE IM FIVE!Every comment is basically gibberish to me as a non musician..
In music, beats (the pulse in most music) are divided into weak beats and strong beats. Usually, the strongest beat is called the “downbeat” and marks groups of beats into measures.
In triple time (which 3/4 is a triple time signature) it looks like this: STRONG – weak – weak | STRONG – weak – weak and so on.
Most waltzes and minuets are in triple time, google one to hear it.
In 4/4 or common time, it looks like this:
STRONG – weak – Strong – weak | STRONG – weak – Strong – weak.
Beats 1 and 3 are strong, with beat 1 being the down beat, beats 2 and 4 are weak beats. Listen to most pop songs. When does the music “line up”? Instruments have a big hit, vocal lines start, etc? Usually it lines up cleanly on the down beats, because they’re the strongest beats and the anchor of the music.
Song structure. Let’s other musicians know where the song is going if you’re in a group setting, and it just makes things easier. Without the time signature acknowledgement, things can get confusing real quick
Think of all time signatures in terms of how many notes over what kind of note. 4/4 is 4 quarter notes to a measure, meaning that the emphasis or “downbeat” will be your first note in each measure. The same goes for 3/4. It’s 3 quarter notes to a measure so the emphasis will be every three quarter notes. If say a drummer is in one time signature and the bass player is in another, when they play together, they’ll make music that is off kilter sounding. If it sounds good it’s what we call a polyrhythm. If it sounds bad then it’s probably crap.
For most applications, you can just keep in mind the first digit. The number of beats won’t matter.
What are some of the replies in this thread lol, this is eli5. 4/4 is 4 crotchets per bar, 3/4 is 3 crotchets per bar, you can feel and hear the difference by accenting the first note.
4/4:
ONE, two, three, four. ONE, two, three, four.
3/4:
ONE, two, three. ONE, two, three.
Alternatively you could mess around with this metronome for a few minutes.
Think of it like “phrase length.”
For a classic example, Billy Joel’s Piano Man is written in 3/4. Think about the opening lines.
Sing us a Song you’re the PIAno man
Sing us a Song … toNIGHT.
You should be able to count 1-2-3-1-2-3 along with it, and notice that most of the sentences start on 1, and if there’s a 1 in the middle of a sentence, that syllable gets a little extra pop. In the Piano Man example, each phrase is 9 beats with 3 beats of silence between.
Music is rhythmic, and there’s a sort of structure to how those rhythms come together. Think of it like a poetry or rap rhyme scheme – if you have x number of syllables in one line, it works best to have x number of syllables in the next.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am!
I do not like them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
etc.
Music uses a lot of repeating patterns, so the time signature like 3/4 and 4/4 sort of dictates when those repeats happen.
4 beats in a measure/ quarter note gets the beat. 3/4 measure are counted 1-2-3, 1-2-3.
4/4 measures are counted 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4
6/8ths time six beats in the measure, 8th note gets the beat so it’s counted 1-2-3-4-5-6, 1-2-3-4-5-6.
Musical phrases have a certain rhythm and natural emphasis on certain beats, and the time signature describes this. Sing “Mary had a Little Lamb” and clap on every 4 beats, starting with the first
4/4:
MA-ry had a LI-ttle lamb (pause)
LI-ttle lamb (pause)
LI-ttle lamb (pause)
Now convert it to 3/4
MA-ry had A lit-tle LAMB (pause pause)
LI-ttle lamb (pause pause pause)
LI-ttle lamb (pause pause pause)
This feels like it was written by someone who has only read about music
Technically, you could put any music in any time signature. Just like you could technically put paragraph breaks wherever you want in a book and it would only mean that the second half of one paragraph becomes the first half of the next, and you might be cutting off one of the characters mid-monologue. But just like paragraphs, time signatures aren’t arbitrary groupings of notes.
90% of western music can be broken down into patterns based on groups of 4 beats. Of the other 10%, most can broken down into groups of 3 beats instead, which is what we have 3/4 time for. The time signature is there to communicate how to count the song in their head for the song to make sense.
Weirdly, it’s an extremely intuitive concept when you’re not using sheet music. But when you’re a beginner musician first learning to read it, and the music just looks like a series of notes you need to play, I don’t blame you for wondering. It’s something that needs to be felt in the music to understand.
If you rock your head front and back (like hip hop) it’s 4/4.
If you move your head left and right (like a ballad) it’s 3/4
There are also other more complex measures but that’s weird anyways
You are correct in terms of duration and note amount in the song as a whole, however that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Everything can fit into anything when it comes to measures if you are creative enough (accountants can fit whole yachts in company expenses so this is nothing xD).
Measures are mostly about dividing an amount of notes in a way that makes musical sense i.e. something important happens at the beginning of each measure (so called downbeat)
If you want to see the musical effect of that, you can try to clap only the one, counting in 3 listening to a 4 song or vice versa. Result is that you will land on the notes of the piece, but what you listen will not make sense musically. If you are not musically inclined it will be VERY difficult and that is a first sign that there is something ‘wrong’ with what you are doing, even if something aligns with something.
Not an ELI5 but look up the song Marimba Jam by G-Space. Good example of 3/4 and how the measures resolve. The way the snare is placed relative to the rest of the song made it easier for me to “see” 3/4 as you can count out both 4 measure of 3/4 and 3 measures of 4/4 through the song, and there’s a part at the end where it switches to 4/4 too to emphasize the difference.
Play it, find the quarter note tempo, and when the drums come in count 1 2 3 4 , 2 2 3 4, 3 2 3 4 like normal 4/4 and this will track with the snare. Then 1 2 3, 2 2 3, 3 2 3, 4 2 3 which follows more easily with the rest of the music. Both counts get you 12 beats per cycle and their emphasis syncs on the first snare hit then they resolve at the end of the pattern.
3/4 & 4/4 & anything else can be understood as beats/time. So the time is divided in 4 equal parts and you hit 3 or 4 beats in those parts. For 4/4 it’s super easy because beat once for every part. For 3/4 there’s a pause to make it 4/4 or one beat is stressed across 2 parts. Overall it makes 4.
So for time signatures like that, the top number denotes how many of a particular note is in a measure, and the bottom number dictates what note the top number means, so 3/4 and 4/4 have 3 quarter notes and 4 quarter notes per measure, respectively
The main importance is that counting measures matters, and can affect how the music feels
during a music theory class I took a few years ago, I learned that you can identify the time signatures of music literally just by listening to them, with no sheet music or never having heard the song before, because it makes that much of a difference
something in 3/4 feels different than something in 4/4, and more often than not you can hear it in the music itself
If you keep all notes on a sheet the same, it sounds the same whether you write 3/4 or 4/4 in front of it. The notes completely determine how the music sounds, the extra information doesn’t change it, it’s just supposed to help reading it.
The notes have different repeating patterns and the musician would be confused if you write 4/4 in front of a piece that has a pattern of three notes that repeats.
Also – don’t look for mathematical logic. 4/4 is not the same as 8/8 or 1 and 3/4 is not 0.75. It should be called “type four four” instead of “four fourths” in my opinion, but I’m not a trained musician, so take everything with a grain of salt.
The bottom number, in these cases 4, is now many beats are in a whole note. In this case, 4, so 1 quarter note is one beat
In 8/8 time, 1 eighth note is one beat
The top number is how many beats go into a measure, so in 4/4, 4 quarter notes can fit into a measure, but in 3/4 only 3 can.
While technically you could write music without any measures at all, it makes the process of writing, reading, and playing the music far simpler because you can see the structure underneath.
It’s like each measure is a word, each note is a syllable, and the song is telling a story. While you could read the story without spaces or punctuation, the measures make it far easier to interpret.
If the music is written in 3/4 and you rewrite it in 4/4, it’s like you’d be trying to read a paragraph of 3 syllable words, but you broke them all apart and rearranged them so they’d all make 4 syllable words
Some good answers here already. And you make good points. Really, we could put bar lines wherever we want in a piece of music, smattering them around the place. We could put one between each note if we wanted.
But the surprising thing about a lot of music theory and the choices we make, is that a lot of it is based on how it feels. We put three beats per measure in 3/4 because the music is felt in groups of three.
But you could also put 6 eighth notes in a bar, that has the same number of beats in a bar. But 6/8 has a different feel to it.
Same thing with accidentals! Like some pieces of music will have F double sharp, rather than G. It’s because F double sharp has a different feel than G in the context of the music, it has a different function.
So we do our best to put the symbols on the page that best describe how the music is supposed to be played and felt.
This is one of the best visual representations of different time signatures I’ve ever come across. Including 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/4, etc
If a piece follows a pattern of strong-weak-weak-weak in groups of 4, 4/4 is a commonly used time signature for that. If a piece follows a pattern of strong-weak-weak (like a waltz), then 3/4 is easier to deal with. You still could write a waltz in 4/4, but it would make it trickier to read.
> What does that accomplish? To me it just means the piece will have more measures… but you will still be hitting that note at the same time as far as anyone not reading the music can tell.
Yes, that is technically true. You could write an entire 52-minute long 71-beats-per-minute musical piece as a single measure in 3692/4 time if you really wanted to do so without the audience knowing the difference… but it would really be a pain for the human musicians trying to read the sheet music and play the darned thing!
It is usually a lot easier for people to think in terms of more bite-sized chunks… and oftentimes a piece of music will have a pattern of beats that lines up more nicely with a specific choice of written chunk size.
For example consider the beat “BAM-bam-bam-BAM-bam-bam-BAM-bam-bam-BAM-bam-bam” and how you could slice that up that into measures:
> 2/4: BAM-bam | bam-BAM | bam-bam | BAM-bam | bam-BAM | bam-bam
> 3/4: BAM-bam-bam | BAM-bam-bam | BAM-bam-bam | BAM-bam-bam
> 4/4: BAM-bam-bam-BAM | bam-bam-BAM-bam | bam-BAM-bam-bam
All three ways of chunking that beat into bars on the page accomplish valid transcriptions that should technically be played in the same way… but of the three only the 3/4 choice highlights the fact that “It’s just ‘BAM-bam-bam’ repeated four times!” whereas the other options don’t divide a 3-note-pattern as nicely and inadvertently make the written notes harder to parse.
They each give a different feeling to the music. 4/4 or 2/4 feel more like a solid march where as 3/4 can feel more skewed. More like skipping than marching.
4/4 is like saying “whippersnapper” repeatedly, with one syllable per beat
WHIP-per-snap-per , Whip-per-snap-per …
3/4 is like doing the same, but with “hamburger”
HAM-bur-ger HAM-bur-ger …
You’re still saying one syllable for each beat, but it changes the rhythm
The first 4 number in 4/4 tells us the basic rhythm sounds like 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4.
The first 3 number in 3/4 tells us the basic rhythm sounds like 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3.
The /4 in both tells you the standard note length (how long each beat/note plays for) used for both rhythms.
So, if both pieces of music (4/4 and 3/4) were supposed to be played at 60 beats per minute, the 4/4 piece of music would have 15 bars of music played in that time, but the 3/4 piece of music would have 20 bars played.
When playing music that is 3/4, the simplest way many people actually play it is to emphasise the first beat only in every bar, that is, beat 1. This is the beat that waltzes use. When playing 4/4, the simplest way many play it is to emphasise the first (think an old fashioned steam train rhythm) and sometimes the third beat in each bar.
If you want to feel the difference do the following:
Start clapping at some tempo. Don’t do it to music, but you can do it to a metronome or click track. Do it for a bit until you are keeping a steady rhythm with equal time between claps.
Now, stop. You’re going to start again, but when you do, you are going to do a stomp and then three claps and repeat the pattern – stomp, clap, clap clap.
Stop, and now when you start you’re going to do a stomp followed by two claps and repeat that pattern – stomp, clap, clap.
The first matches 4/4 timing because the pattern repeats every 4th beat. The second is 3/4 because the pattern repeats every 3rd beat.
I am currently listening to a song in 6/8 timing, which has a double speed 3/4 feel with a double length pattern that you can mimic by doing stomp, clap, clap, snap, clap, clap at a faster pace than you did the earlier patterns.
When musicians play they emphasize patterns and notes within the patterns to create the feel of the timing.
Hahahahhahahahahahahay
God damn music perpetually confused me for a while.
musical notation is a LANGUAGE, not a science or math thing. It’s like learning mandarin, not physics.
first consult BPM. This is how fast beats are coming at u.
then look at the bottom number. How many subdivisions is each bar chunked into? How many beats per bar.
now look at the top number. This is where EMPHASIS will happen. Walz is 3/4 but if it has a 200 BPM it’s very fast lol.
If it’s 3/4, the emphasis will be on every 3rd beat, but the overall music will be divided into chunks of 4. So, unification of the emphasis and melody (aka where Change happens) will happen on the 12, since that’s where multiples of 3 and 4 overlap.
The math makes sense there but WATCH OUT, that’s just a language playing nice with math’s predictability, like narratives having a 3-part act. It’s not necessary or present in all music to have nice even multiples, it’s just a fun lil toy that some authors/musicians fuck with.
The rules of music are just like the rules of a language.
They make fuck all sense if you try to get scientific about hertz or shit like that, it’s something to do with HISTORY, and is entirely relative to the CULTURE rhat uses it.
China and India use entirely different musical notation. It’s a different language.
English fucks w goose and geese/gice, and mouse and meese/mice, and also fucks with 3/4 and 7/6 measures hahahaha.
It works because we say it does. There’s no mathematical proof.
First (top) number: How high do I count before starting over? Second (bottom) number: How fast do I count?
If you wrote both 4/4 and 3/4 at the same time at the same speed (tempo):
1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4
1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3
These sets of numbers (4/4, 3/4, etc.) are called a time signature. Music can only follow a single time signature at once. Increasing the top number makes you count higher before you start over again. Increasing the bottom number makes you count faster, even if the tempo of the song stays the same. The bottom number must be a multiple of 4 and it’s speed doubles every time you increase it, i.e. 4,8,16,32. This is because the bottom number is based on an actual note values in music theory; 4=quarter note, 8=8th note, 16=16th note, etc. The tempo of a song is also based on a note value, which is why if you change from 4/4, to 4/8 in the middle of the song, the tempo stays the same even though you are now counting twice as fast. If the tempo is “120 bpm”, music needs a reference to say what is 120. The most common case is “quarter note = 120 bpm”, but you could pick any note value you want.
If you hear about following different types of counting at the same time that is known as a polyrhythm.