The numbers in the ratio of time signature have a standard meaning, they
are not arbitrary. Sure you can sit and count up to 5 over and over on
some tempo synced to a peice of music, but that isn't the meaning of#/# in
standard staff notation. There is a practical use for it, sure you can
just force writing a song into a staff notation with the wrong time
signature and ignore the glaringly obvious dominant patterns that are in
the music. It will look like crap as the bar lines don't relate to the
music at all, so why would anyone bother? It is like writ ingl iket his,
what isth epoi nt? There is nothing so experimental about the music
discussed on this list to need to change the traditional definition in
order to talk about the music, I feel. There is plenty of experimenting
going on within what are traditional music approaches. We're mostly just
hearing different amounts of syncopation within what would most easily be
notated as 4/4 when talking about most of the music brought up on this
list (all this clever techno / idm stuff, that is).
'time signature' has a real meaning: the number of beats per measure over
the note-value used to display it in standard staff notation.
I'm talking about the same western notation that usually has you use a
lower-case 'c' to represent 4/4, as that is the common time sig. Won't
anybody go look on the web, if not a book, to clarify this stuff? It is
right there; there isn't much left to debate about about what an old term
means.
Here is a typical example:
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~kknox/musicweb/musictime.html
If you don't think these traditional terms describe what you want to talk
about in music, make up new ones! 4OTF (4 on the floor) is a great new
term, so is 'glitchy' for an adjective about that sort of thing.
Solenoid
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org