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5.2: Prepare Yourself!

  • Page ID
    310493
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    Again, learning music is similar to learning a language. First, you must get the sounds in your ears. Only then can you reproduce them yourself and, eventually, be able to translate what you hear into written notation. Before you enter a degree program, it would be helpful to be able to sing intervals accurately and perform simple melodies at sight (this applies to instrumentalists as well as vocalists). You will find several different ways to label pitches and rhythms in this chapter.

    Symbols of Duration/Rhythmic Notation

    Rhythms are patterns of sound in time, a basic element of all music. Beat is the unit division of musical time. The beat is the steady pulse that might make you want to tap your feet or move to it. That’s good—rhythm has to be felt in the body!

    Meter

    Meter is the way we group the beats. More formally, it is the beats organized into recognizable/recurring accent patterns. We group eggs by the dozen. We group days by the week. We group beats into twos and threes. That is meter. There are two basic kinds of meter: duple and triple. In other words, you can either march to duple (two beats = strong-weak) or sway to it with triple meter (three beats = strong-weak-weak). Each of the beats can then also be divided into either two (simple meter) or three (compound meter). Here are a few examples:

    Rain, Rain Go Away

    Duple simple (two beats in a measure, beats are divided into two)

    37-Rain-Rain.png

    My Country ‘Tis of Thee

    Triple simple (three beats in a measure, beats are divided into two).

    my country tis of thee.png

    Row Your Boat

    Duple compound (two beats per measure, beats are divided over three)

    39-Row-Your-Boat.png


    This page titled 5.2: Prepare Yourself! is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jill Wilson and Natalie Steele Royston (Iowa State University Digital Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.