Musical Beat
From bib. source
The beat is the basic pulse of a musical passage. To determine the beat of a passage you are listening to, tap your foot to the music, or try to imagine the way a conductor would conduct the passage–the conductor’s arm movement. The resulting steady pulse is called the beat, and the rate at which the beats occur is called the tempo.
In other words, the beat of a musical track or passage is the “basic pulse” of that musical track (Almén 2018, 24). But what is the pulse of the track? In terms of the phenomenology of the pulse, it seems to be recognized through a kind of kinesthetic intuition, as demonstrated in the instructive examples above (Ibid): the synchronized movement the conductor’s arm achieves, or the synchronized foot tapping the person’s foot achieves.
Meanwhile, the beat can be treated as comprising “the time aspect of music” known as rhythm, and “the rate at which the beats occur is called the tempo” (Ibid).
Kinesthetic intuition, pulse v. beat, and the measure/bar
It would seem–if one observes the relative temporal point at which the minimal synchronized bodily movement occurs–that the pulse happens either at the beginning or middle of a given repeated sequence of sound events or alternating repetition of different sequences of sound events. However, no matter where in the sequence it may be observed to occur, it seems to serve to anchor the relative duration of repeated, alternated or distinct clusters or sets of sequential sound events. The pulse itself, then, can be treated as marking the duration of those repeated, alternated, or merely distinct clusters or sets of sequential sound events, that can be treated as subdivisions of beats. The beats are, then, the audible subdivisions of the maximally largest possible subdivisions that occur or are allowed to occur around the pulse. This pulse, whose recurrence marks the total duration of each sequence of beats, constitutes the unit of measurement (hence the measure) of the rhythm of the entire track or passage of such beat sequences. The number of measures corresponds to the number of pulses a track or passage contains. In this context, the frequency of the pulse in time, then determines the compression and augmentation of the beat sequences in time (thus also the frequency of those beats), affecting the perceived “speed” of the track itself–and this is known as the tempo. This is because the duration of beats within the measure is relative to the frequency of the pulse, hence why they are given fractional values.
The tempo of a track or passage can be specified “by one of two methods–sometimes by both” (Almén 2018, 25):
- The use of Italian categories such as adagio (slowly, or “at ease”), moderato (moderate), and allegro (fast, quick or bright).
- The minimum amount of beats expected to occur within minute, such beats specified in terms of note durations (which in such a case simply would represent the total number of beat subdivisions occurring in a minute)
To explain the latter further, “if the desired tempo would result in 72 quarter notes”–or crotchet notes–”in one minute,” then (Ibid):
From bib. source
[…], the tempo indication would be ♩= 72 or M.M. ♩= 72.
M.M. stands for…
The M.M. in the above quote stands for “Maelzel’s metronome,” named “after Johann Maelzel, who widely promoted […]” the metronome “during the early nineteenth century” (Ibid).
kinesthesia cluster set music_theory musical_passage musical_track system Italy quarter_note crotchet_note musical_note metronome Maelzels_metronome Johann_Maelzel MM fraction division mathematics mathematical_operator mathematical_operators division_operator division_operators rhythm allegro moderato adagio
bibliography
- Kostka, Stefan, Dorothy Payne, and Byron Almén. Tonal Harmony: With an Introduction to Post-Tonal Music. 8th ed. New York: McGrawHill Education, 2018.