I've been working to understand how tempo/meter/time signatures relate to one another since I first tried studying music a good number of years ago. I think I've recently come to figure things out; could someone who knows better what they're doing check my understanding please? ;)
Below are the notes I've put together explaining the 3 concepts.
Tempo
Below are the notes I've put together explaining the 3 concepts.
Tempo
- The speed of a piece of music, notated using Italian words or in Beats Per Minute (BPM)
- The patterns of sounds and silence in a piece of music, notated with musical notes of differing durations
- E.g., note names and durations (using American/British names)
- Whole note/semibreve: 4 beats
- Half note/minim: 2 beats
- Quarter note/crotchet: 1 beat
- Eighth note/quaver: 0.5 beats
- 16th note/semiquaver: 0.25 beats
- Etc.
- E.g., note names and durations (using American/British names)
- Generally, musical compositions follow repeating patterns of stressed and unstressed beats.
- In music notation, bar lines are placed at the end of each instance of this repeating pattern. The area between adjacent bar lines is called a measure, or bar.
- Beats being stressed/unstressed is achieved by changing the velocity of the notes that correspond to those beats
- The function of time signatures in music is to indicate the pattern of stressed and unstressed beats that the music follows.
- Time signatures are written in a fraction-like format. The upper number (numerator) indicates the number of notes per measure. The lower number indicates the duration/type of these notes.
- For example, 4/4 time indicates that each measure contains 4 notes, and that each note has the duration of a quarter note. 2/8 indicates that each measure has two notes, and that each note is an eighth note.
- Every time signature can be categorized/described along two dimensions
- The number of notes (or groups of notes, explained later) per bar - each note or group of notes represents a beat - corresponds to the numerator
- Duple - 2
- Has a beat pattern of strong, weak
- Triple - 3
- Has a beat pattern of strong, weak, medium
- Quadruple - 4
- Has a beat pattern of strong, weak, medium, weak
- Duple - 2
- The number of notes per beat
- Simple - 1
- Compound - 3
- The number of notes (or groups of notes, explained later) per bar - each note or group of notes represents a beat - corresponds to the numerator
- Simple meter
- Has a straightforward, march-like feel
- Has a note pattern directly corresponding to the time signature, e.g. 4/4 has 4 quarter notes and 2/8 has 2 eighth notes
- Each beat can be divided into even divisions of 2 notes
- Compound meter
- Has a lilting feel
- Every beat is represented by a group of 3 notes; i.e., compound meters can be made by tripling the notes of simple meters
- E.g., the simple triple meter 3/4 corresponds to the compound triple meter 9/4, which has 9 quarter notes
- Each beat can be divided into even divisions of 3 notes
- Compound meters retain the stressed/unstressed patterns inherent to duple/triple/quadruple meters, but those patterns are applied to the groups of notes
- E.g., 9/4 is a triple meter whose 9 quarter notes can be grouped into 3 groups of 3 quarter notes, and the first group is strongly stressed, the second group is weakly stressed, and the third is mediumly stressed