Rhythm and Meter

This video discusses rhythm and meter. These are important terms in music. In addition to the terms rhythm and meter you will need to know the terms beat or pulse, tempo and measure, rhythm section, and metronome. All of these will be important terms for you.

Rhythm can mean the basic or repetitive pulse in music, it can be similar to the beat as in “I feel the rhythm,” “I feel the pulse,” “play this rhythm for me.” But usually “rhythm” for musicians means the way in which notes are played, that articulation of those notes, the patterns of those notes. Unlike “pulse” or “beat,” which are regular in music, rhythms tend not to be as regular.

For instance, take the song “We Will Rock You.” It goes: stomp, stomp, clap; stomp, stomp, clap. If we give the beat: stomp, stomp, clap, beat, stomp, stomp, clap, beat; you see that there is a beat during the rest where there is no note. If we just look at the stomping part it goes: stomp, stomp, beat, beat, stomp, stomp, beat, beat; so the rhythm there is different than the beat. The beat keeps going (tapping noises); but the rhythm: stomp, stomp, rest, rest, stomp, stomp, rest rest; that indicates a difference between beat and rhythm.

“Meter” is the recurring stresses of beats—strong and weak beats.
Let’s look at a few terms we have here for rhythm in the cnx.org reading. Rhythm has more than one definition. We have already talked about that. “I feel the rhythm,” “the rhythm is good for me.”

Beat also have more than one meaning. “Downbeat” is a special type of beat. It begins at the start of the measure or bar. This is often the strongest beat.

Upbeats” are often less strong.

“Measure” or “bar” are the ways in which beats are grouped. We will see a little bit of that below.

Sometimes you have the word “rhythm” used with “rhythm section.” The rhythm section in a band or a group of instruments usually involves the percussion instruments or the drum set but it could also involve the bass player or could include the piano or other keyboard instruments. OK, let’s look at a few examples here.

Oh, I need to talk about the metronome. The metronome is a device that musicians use to regulate the beat. The earliest metronomes were pendulums. You take a string and put a weight at the end and swing it. The longer the string length the slower the movement back and forth. The shorter the string length, the quicker the movement. So in early pieces of music, at certain times, they would give you string lengths to indicate the tempo. We move from that to this type of pendulum metronome. As the weight slides further up the end it takes longer for the weight to swing back and forth. As you move the weight down further it is quicker.
Another type of metronome, which started to occur in the 1970s, was this electronic metronome. Here is a very good close-up of the dial. Notice that it starts at the number 40 here and goes all the way to the something like 208. It goes all the way around there. Now these metronomes (both) would have had the same numbers starting at 40. Those numbers indicate tempos. Tempo is the beats per minute. We often say in English “tempos” as plural, but it is “tempi” in Italian.

A metronome marking of 60 equals one beat per second. If you have a metronome marking of 50 (mm. 50) that equals 50 beats per minute.

OK, So let’s look at a few measures and how this works. We have here Queen’s (We will rock you) the beat numbers, the claps, and the stomps. (I will move that over a little bit.) You can see that this is a recurring pattern. Stomp, stomp, clap, rest, stomp, stomp, clap, rest. It recurs every four beats. These are the beats here. Below that I have the stomps and the claps that indicate the rhythms. See that the rhythms are different than the beats. These are cycles of four. We would say that this is a measure of four beats.

Let’s look at another example here. The last example is Ray Charles, “What’d I Say?” He has a different pattern here. So let’s listen to that.

OK, He has measures here of 2 (beats). This is a very special form called “blues form.” I am having trouble fitting it all in the screen so I am going to have to diminish that a little bit. So that you can see the whole thing in our screen here. I will move this over here. That is better, OK.

Ray Charles, “What’d I Say?” You are hearing here the Wurlitzer electronic piano. The Wurlitzer electronic piano was a special piano developed around the time of this piece (perhaps a little earlier). This instrument was famous with a lot of Jazz musicians. OK, let’s play this again and I am going to go along with my cursor here so that you can see that.

Did you see that? We have repetitions. Each measure has two beats in it: 1, 2; then another 1, 2; 1, 2. But you also find in the bass that he has Es and As, E, B, A, E. This is the 12-bar blues form. This is a very common form used in music by many musicians, particularly in Jazz. Ray Charles and many others have used that. So let’s listen to this cycle, these repetitions of beats again. Here we go. Let’s listen to a couple of cycles so you get the idea.

Well, I hope that this gives you an idea of the meter here. This is a meter with two beats in the measure. The meter up above would be four beats in the measure. The meters differ in these two examples: in Queen “We Will Rock You” and in the Ray Charles piece. I hope this has helped you to define the difference between rhythm and meter. And to figure out pulse and what a metronome is and the metronome markings.