I’m talking about time signatures, of course. Meter, in music. What else is it, ever. At times a slippery subject, not least because so many people are so vocally and defiantly wrong about it. Or just wrong enough to screw everything up for all the poor innocents inquiring online trying to figure it out. The pressure of being that effing wrong arouses an urgent need to be heard, to denounce, to bolt into the public square to spew defective beliefs.
Sorry, I had a conversation.
Lots of italics in this post. My main instrument for expressing exasperation.
Let’s step through this as though we’re newborn infants:
A time signature tells you how big the box is.
How many (top number) of what kind of note (bottom number) fits in one measure of music.
That’s the basic thing. It also tells us how many beats we count per measure, and what their subdivision is, but not always directly. This fact drives many totally insane.
- Top number = how many
- Bottom number = what kind
- The kinds of notes referred to by the bottom number are durational fractions of a whole note— half, quarter, 8th, 16th.
- A whole note happens to fill a whole measure of 4/4 time, but there is no implied connection of whole note / whole measure.
It’s very simple, but is not understood by a writer named Ethan Hein, who teaches music in some capacity at New York University and the New School, who has written a blog post entitled The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me, in which he beefs:
The top number in a time signature is easy to understand. Is the song in four? Count “one, two, three, four.” Is it in three? Count “one, two, three.” Is it in five? Count “one, two, three, four, five.” That’s all there is to it. However, the bottom number is another story. What is going on down there?
He skipped a step— who said the top number = what the song is “in”? What does “in” even mean?
- In = the number of counted beats per measure. Four counted beats = “it’s in 4”
- Beat = the major felt pulse— the conducted pulse, the dance pulse, the marching pulse.
The top number tells you how many counted beats there will be per measure, but not always directly— the literal number is not always the number of counted beats. When the bottom number is 8, beats are three 8ths long, so the counted beats = the top number divided by three.
There is more, but that will have to suffice for now. To continue:
Every explanation I have ever seen of the bottom number is circular. Say we’re talking about 4/4 time, so a beat is a quarter note long. Okay, so what is a quarter note? Well, four of them make a measure. And what’s a measure? Uh… four quarter notes.
I have literally never seen those given as definitions of quarter note and measure, that he claims are the only definitions he can find. To even get those answers you would have to ask the question in a stranger way than he has admitted to here.
To be as wrong as he is being, we need to pretend that definitions of things are local to one particular situation and statement. His hypothetical conversation above is equivalent to:
“There are four dogs in my yard.”
“But what is a dog?”
“It’s what’s in my yard.”
“What is a yard?”
“It’s what four dogs are in.”
Or:
“I drive a 1973 Gremlin.”
“What’s a Gremlin?”
“It’s what I drive a 1973 of.”
“What is driving?”
“It’s what I do with a 1973 Gremlin.”
“What’s 1973?”
“It’s what the Gremlin I drive is.”
1973. Horrible company, worse cars. My family had the ’73 Matador wagon.
Obviously, Yard, dog, drive, 1973, and Gremlin all have meanings independent of the very limited scope of what’s said in the opening statement, and any normal person you speak to will be competent to explain them to you as such.
A yard is a small plot of land attached to an individual dwelling, a dog is an animal member of the species canis familiaris, frequently kept by humans as pets and work animals, 1973 is a year in the common era, Gremlin is a model of car manufactured and sold at one time by the American Motors Company.
Same thing with music. The correct answer would not reference the present time signature, but would involve explaining the rhythm values, which are based on progressive halvings of relative duration, starting with the whole note. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this to a professional music educator.
At this point I have to bail. I attempted a longer refusal, but he beat me. The errors of understanding are beginning to compound, becoming sentient. You have to hack your way through half a dozen false premises just to find a main point to dispute. It all could have been remedied with a couple of years of middle school band. After this he has put together a playlist of musical examples to illustrate this difficult concept to some other people who have no idea what they’re doing— tourists in an alien landscape.
Postscript: Mr. Hein links to a piece unpromisingly entitled Time signatures: the confusion continues…, by Andrea La Rose, which leads with an advertisement of her own incapacity to communicate elementary ideas in a simple way.
Fellow musician/educator/substacker Ethan Hein had a post about time signatures and how they are confusing and difficult to teach. They are indeed confusing and difficult to teach! We often just teach it through brute rote and memorization. Especially if you are working with younger children, it often seems simply more efficient to get everyone to nod and say yes and move on with making music, than to go into the gorey details. Dr.[!!!! -tb] Hein points out that the confusion often remains with people well into adulthood.
And I’ll admit that going into all the gorey details may create more confusion, but I’m going to do my best to clear some of the cobwebs and mystery surrounding time signatures.
Helpless to make a concise, totally transparent explanation like the one I wrote at the top of this post, we launch into an exploration of the history of Catholic church doctrine on rhythm, of Gregorian notation, and of privilege in medieval society.
One thing I like:
Nowadays when you learn notation, you are told that a dotted half note is three beats, because the quarter note gets the beat. Fine. That’s easy enough. When you get to the dotted quarter, you are told that the dot adds half of the note value to the note. This is totally and completely mathematically true! But musically, it’s a terrible explanation. This is where music literacy often falls apart and if that doesn’t kill it, the dotted eighth note will do the job quite nicely, because who is audiating an eighth plus a sixteenth? And if you, like me, started learning about dotted eighths when you were eight and hadn’t learned fractions yet, it’s that much harder to conceptualize and audiate. This is one of the points where people quit lessons.
I am on a mission to restore the threeness to the dot!
I’ve only seen one basic explanation of the dot, and that is that it lengthens a note by half. I agree that it isn’t a very good explanation, and it would be better to just explain it as three of its undotted subdivision:
quarter note = two 8ths long
dotted quarter = three 8ths long
Understanding that is important for reading any compound meter— 6/8, 12/8, 9/8— where the dotted quarter gets the beat. The “50% longer” concept is a barrier to that.
She eventually concludes:
So here’s the thing about time signatures: they basically only tell you that everything in the measure adds up to a certain duration, expressed in a number of notes. They don’t necessarily tell you how to audiate what is going on. That information you gain through the experience of listening to, reading, and playing from notation; and, of course, music teachers helping you out, hopefully. A time signature of 4|4 might actually be something more like two macrobeats that are divided into 3 plus one divided into 2, in which the microbeats are the same length, but the macrobeats are not. Regardless, everything adds up to 4 quarter notes.
A convoluted way of saying what I said in my opening, that the time signature just tells you the size of the box. Getting these people to state something plainly is like getting a baroque harpsicordist to play a quarter note, you have to put up with 45 minutes of dancing around.
But they just can’t leave it alone:
But still: Why do we have so many ways of expressing the same basic metric feel?
Oh my God, I seriously gotta go. This is not supposed to happen.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
Email Todd | Call or text +1(503)380-9259 | Chat on WhatsApp
You do a fine job of explaining why time signatures are confusing, and I’m fine with your contempt for my attempt at explaining them, but how do you explain them? When I tell students that note durations “are based on progressive halvings of relative duration, starting with the whole note”, their next logical question is, “great, what’s a whole note?” I don’t know of a way to answer that except in circular terms referring back to the subdivisions.
I have had other music educators tell me that they don’t try to explain time signatures, they just run through repertoire and let students pick everything up from vibes. I see the practical wisdom of that, but am not satisfied by it. Andrea’s post at least tries to give the historical origins, which are just as illogical as the modern-day conventions but at least show that the conventions evolved from something.
For real, if you have a better way to explain all this, I would love to know what it is. I don’t think there’s anything wonderful about the way I do it. I just don’t like using circular explanations or statements that are illogical on their face. If you tell a student, “The top number tells you how many counted beats there will be per measure, but not always directly— the literal number is not always the number of counted beats. When the bottom number is 8, beats are three 8ths long, so the counted beats = the top number divided by three”, and they look back at you with bewilderment, what do you say? If the answer really is, look, it’s just a convention, it doesn’t have to make logical sense, then I can live with that, but I would like to think there’s a better way.
Quickest response I’ve ever seen to anything I’ve written.
No contempt, I’m just constantly mystified, and frustrated, by people’s problems with this, x100 when those people are music professionals.
I explain these things very similarly to the way I did at the top of this post, in the course of teaching students to play. I don’t just barf a long definition at them and expect them to understand it instantly in the abstract– that would be as misguided as anything else here, it has to be applied, learned in the course of doing music.
And, to be clear, that is *not* getting it by vibe, that’s learning it correctly.
re: defining a whole note: Is it so difficult to just say it is the foundation note value from which the others are derived? What’s a gallon of milk vs. a quart, what’s an orange vs. half an orange? A dozen oranges vs. a half dozen. Why does it need to be something other than a base value?
re: that barfed definition: “The top number tells you how many counted beats there will be per measure, but not always directly— the literal number is not always the number of counted beats. When the bottom number is 8, beats are three 8ths long, so the counted beats = the top number divided by three”:
I don’t know where this expectation of brevity came from. That information is given in stages as a student learns to read– it’s just a fact of life that it’s too complicated (or maybe just abstract) for a beginner to absorb from a one sentence verbal explanantion. All of that above would be prefaced with some background on what a beat is, what a measure is, and on what time signatures define– how many beats per measure, and their subdivision.
A gallon of milk is a concrete physical object you can point to. A whole note is an abstraction that needs explanation. Which, again, most music educators I have spoken to about this do what you do! Everybody just plays a lot of rep until they have a feel for what 3/4 is and what 6/8 is based on vibes. But picking up a convention from usage is not explaining, and I have not seen a good explanation that wasn’t just, look, this is a historical kludge, it’s maybe not the system you would design from scratch. Which, again, if that’s the ultimate truth of the matter, fine! That’s where Andrea’s historical explanation comes down, and plenty of other music theory concepts are that way. I just don’t like being criticized for having a poor explanation when no one else seems to have a better one.
Yes, you can understand a gallon of milk “by vibe” by looking at it and handling it. You haven’t explained what “a gallon” is in the abstact, in the way you’re demanding in re: a whole note, here. You’re telling me to accept that through a whole lot of reps, I’ll just have a feel for what a gallon is.
I would like to know, though, who made this rule that verbal explanation is the superior form of instruction, and of knowledge, and that doing it is somehow fake “vibe” knowledge. Doing it is the whole point, it’s non-negotiable, it is not a thing and it cannot be understood apart from that. It’s theory people’s job to make a verbal explanation, but that is not even supposed to have anything to do with the actual practice of music.
I’m also detecting a strange distance from the actual usage of these musical systems in all of this– like, the difference between 3/4 and 6/8 is not imprecise knowledge, it doesn’t take a lot of repetition to know the difference. It takes playing literally one piece of music in either meter to know exactly what it is and how it is counted. As I did when I was 14. The only possible way to be confused is if a person never actually played music and was just looking at numbers on paper.
Do you play an instrument? Or do you just do electronic music, or production, or what?
I play guitar, mandolin, banjo, other related string instruments, plus a little music-theory-teacher-level piano. I teach music theory, so, yeah, I do have to be able to explain things. The kids learn how to count in 6/8 in their lessons just fine, the same way they learn to read the notes, but in the same way that I need them to understand that the notes form scales and chords and aren’t just arbitrary, it would be nice for them to understand the underlying concept of how meters work. No one is saying that one or the other learning method is better, but the kids in my program do both, and I teach theory, so.
OK. I still don’t understand the difficulty of it. If people are taking a theory class, they have some adult capacity for understanding semi-complex ideas in the abstract. It’s never going to be a tactile thing, and there’s not going to be a clean one sentence answer for everything.
It’s still damn simple:
Rhythm values are based on successive halvings in duration of a base “whole” note.
A measure is a box of notes in time.
Meter sets the size of the box, =ing some number of some kind of rhythm value– indicating how beats are counted, and setting their rhythm value, and their major subdivision.
That is a non-circular explanation of how the system is organized, so I guess you’re set, right? Nothing we can do about the inherited terms and symbols, any more than with any written language. None of these things were pre-designed as optimal systems, they were developed out of simpler forms of communication, and have continued to be used because they are adaptable and expandable and have proven to be mostly suitable for artists’ purposes as *those* have evolved.
“Meter sets the size of the box, =ing some number of some kind of rhythm value– indicating how beats are counted, and setting their rhythm value, and their major subdivision.” That is undeniably true but also does nothing to help someone understand why you count 6/8 in 2, or why 2/2 is sometimes an indication that a piece is very slow and sometimes it’s an indication that it’s very fast. That’s the stuff that gives my students the headaches. If the answer is, “It doesn’t make sense, it’s an arbitrary convention”, that at least has the virtue of not making them feel stupid for not seeing the logic.
Re: 6/8 counted in 2: That’s backwards, the question is, why is a compound meter counted in 2 notated as 6/8?
The reason is, given the format of time signatures, and the fact that the rhythm tree is based on halvings, to indicate a three note subdivision in the time signature as top note=# of beats/bottom note=value of the beat is impossible, and 6/8 is the nearest possible way to do it. it’s not great, but the rule is consistent with other compound meters, and it’s only really a problem because people insist on clinging to that bad “top note = number of beats” explanation.
It’s not arbitrary, it’s what is possible within the limitations of the system.
Re: 2/2 implying a tempo: the only implied tempo for any meter, is that the major felt pulse be reasonably within the standard range of tempos, approx. 40-208 bpm.
Any other expectation is historical practice that you’re imposing on it– it’s not implicit in the meter itself. Your students are right to be confused by it, I don’t believe you should be teaching that.