What is a time signuature in music? Perhaps when you hear a time signature your mind goes scurrying off to astronomy class or a science-fiction movie!
A time signature in music is something which a performer can look at and instantly tell how the music is generally laid out and what the basic rhythm of the piece is going to be.
A time signature looks like a fraction and occurs at the beginning of a piece and and then in the middle of a piece of music only when switching to or from another one. So...a piece could start in tempo A and then switch to tempo B, and then back again to A or to a whole new tempo C!!
The fraction part is quite easy to decipher. The top note tells you how many beats/pulses there are in one solitary measure. The bottom number in the "fraction" tells you what type of note the beat/pulse will equal.
Example: the most common time signature is 4/4 (the line would not be present in real music). The top number 4 means that there are four main pulses in each measure. The bottom mote indicates that quarter note is equal to one of the four pulses in the measure. This means that there are four quarter notes in one measure. Still with me?
Example 2: lets consider 6/8. What does the top note tell us? [answer: there are six beats/pulses per measure] Now what does the bottom note indicate? It indicates that an eighth note (half of a quarter note) gets one beat. There are 6 eighth notes per measure!!
Tomorrow I am going to attempt to post about the hierarchy between the different "notes" so that any confusion that exists can be cleared up!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment