Fun Stuff > BAND
humans and time signatures
CaptainLorax:
If I had my way the metronome would be coordinated with the resting heartbeat :mrgreen:
nuisance:
I remember reading comments from Dave Brubeck (famous for playing in strange, un-swinging time signatures, as in his group's most popular tune, Take Five) that when he played in Eastern Europe people would happily clap along in whatever non-standard time they were in. I reckon that reinforces the notion that its purely cultural convention.
I've written things in a variety of time signatures, but I don't find it comes naturally. Dropping out beats every now and then is pretty easy though... happens every now and then in pop music. Classic disco examples I remember being Blondie's Heart of Glass and The Bee-Gees' Jive Talking.
Thrillho:
I find that recently I've been able to play songs that drop beats or lose time signatures fairly easily, whereas I had difficulty before. I think this comes from learning songs with weirder time signatures. I could probably trace the origin of my ease with time signatures now back to the day I knew I could play and sing 'Money' by Pink Floyd at the same time.
These days I like putting covers into weird time signatures, such as my version of the Arctic Monkeys 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' which is, in different parts, in 6/8 or 5/4 and played in a jazz styley with piano solos.
timehat:
I've had similar experience. I think I've spent so much time listening to music with ridiculous time signatures as well as forcing myself to play in odd timing have rendered my musical ability to the point where when I write, I'm probably more likely to naturally come up with parts that aren't in 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8 and often, when they are in normal time signatures, the amount of measures in the section is strange. So I guess what I'm saying is that I successfully 'broke' my sense of timing.
elcapitan:
--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 05 Oct 2006, 03:07 ---I too have pondered this question and the best I can come up with is that humans just like things that are divided into 2, 4, 3 or by the Golden Ratio (i.e; approximately 1:1.8). This is true of arcitecture, graphic design, and art, so why not music?
--- End quote ---
Kinda. Some interesting comments about phi, the Fibonacci sequence and music can be found here and here.
Also, this thread gets two thumbs up.
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