18 Dec
2002
18 Dec
'02
8:09 p.m.
Tim Goetze wrote:
Which is sometimes the case in recent music of many genres.
>>please, please, please, ask your favourite musician friends.
>>read good books about it. listen to indian, jazz, techno,
>>blues, classical western, classical indian, japanese, rap,
>>whatever music: rhythmn is integral.
>>
Except when it isn't.
Well, which
ones qualify?
all of them.
rhythmn is always based on one integral periodic 'pulse'. if
time is not divisible by this atom, there is no musical time.
the float meter proposal is like using floats to count
your
fingers.
Which people do on a regular basis. Are you familiar with the music
of Brian Ferneyhough? Or Tristan Murail? Or Richard Barrett?
Or Gerard Grisey? Or, from a completely different angle, Steve
Reich?
Given the following metric pattern:
4/4-3/8-2/4-7/16
In this case, many people continue to experience the quarter note
as the pulse, both as listeners and performers. I would teach my
music theory students to think of this as a 4-beat bar, followed
by a 1.5 beat bar, followed by a 2 beat bar, followed by a 1.75
beat bar. I realize that some people do think of passages like
this in terms of a constantly-changing counting unit, but I
believe the majority of people out there would agree with me
on this one.
If you really *want* a bar that's shortened by
a fractional beat
(which is not all that unusual, even in pop music), what do you
do...? How do you ensure that plugins that beat sync don't freak out
when you multiply the meter to get integers?
if you shorten, for example, 4/4 by 1/16, it's 15/16. if you
shorten it by 1/32, it's 31/32 etc.
if you want to shorten 4/4 by, say, 1/16 + 0.00212266328763,
you're violating the very principle of the organization of
musical time.
you're better off simply inserting a new meter
where the shortened measure ends.
and what seems to be the problem with beat sync? the relation
of the meter to TIMEBASE is part of the tempo information, so
all info you need, you have.
*
again, i strongly recommend you do some research on music and
its theory and then round off your studies with some sequencer
implementation reading, or even better, writing.
I don't know about anyone else contributing to this discussion,
but I have an M.A. in music composition and have taught
music theory on the university level. I'll freely admit to being
ignorant about things like DSP programming, but I like to think
I know something about music theory.