![]() ![]() Waltz rhythm is my beat, and I sense the world lives in three-quarter time. You ever tried walking to Paranoid Android? The beat changes really throw you off your pace. I think the answer is very simply because we have two legs and two arms, making it feel natural to respond to 4/4, or 2/4 even more so. I would say that the rhythm is definitely inbuilt in humans as this is how this timing would have developed – you can imagine people walking together and making up songs as they went. I think there is definitely a predisposition for 4/4 or 2/4 timing as this is the natural pace of walking and marching. African drumming, as an example, often favours 3/2. There may be cultural preferences but it isn’t a human predisposition. ![]() It’s more of a western disposition if anything – lots of Turkish, Greek and Indian music is in odd times such as 9/8. You can get some strong, driving rhythms going with a fast reel, but for dance music you can’t beat the bounce of a 6/8 jig. In Irish music the most common time signatures are 4/4 for reels and 6/8 for jigs. So asking the question “Is 4/4 universal?” then becomes as meaningful, and culturally relevant, as asking what ragas are most commonly used in popular music? Diversity of musical thought makes the world a better place. Time is experienced as a flow rather than a series of discrete events. In traditional south Asian musical thought, for example, time is measured by matra, the space between “beats”. Beat is generally understood as a discrete point in time in western musical thought, and time is measured by the succession of beats. The question assumes that “beat” means the same thing in every music culture. This was further emphasised in a medical context with the campaign of giving first aid chest compressions using the aptly chosen Bee Gees song Stayin’ Alive. Logic suggests there must be a human predisposition to a 4/4 beat because in music where this is in the composition it either tunes into one’s own natural heart rhythm, or causes it to increase in time with it. Der-duh of the 4/4 is the same as the heartbeat, the opening of the door to the home and the clunking of the pump on the bar. I suspect it’s because the rhythm is iambic – like the English language. A perusal of recordings of world music will show any listener that a wide variety of music has greater depth and more interesting meters, melodies, harmonies, timbres, acoustic instruments, rhythmic and personal interaction than any recent example of commercial music. Waltzes in 3/4 were also popular, right through to the 1930s. Mark Bush, Milton Keynesĭance music in 19th-century Britain and America was often in 6/8 time, and songs were quite often ballads with no strong beats at all. The C that is often printed on scores nowadays to mean common time (4/4) is in fact a broken circle and was known as imperfect time, whereas a full circle indicated perfect time, which we would today write as 3/4. Go back to the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe when the influence of the Christian church was very strong and much music was in 3/4, with the three reflecting the holy trinity of father, son and holy ghost. I think it is cultural, rather than inherent. Limit ourselves to only Europe, and from Irish jigs to mazurkas or waltzes or a flamenco compas or a Transylvanian învârtita to the Macedonian eleno mome, the question a Martian might ask is: “Why is hardly any Earth music in 4/4?” BrendasIronSledgeĪnyone who listens to prog knows that if it ain’t in 13/8 (or would that be alternating bars of 3/4 and 7/8?) then it ain’t music. ![]()
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