Beat and

meter are rather easy to understand.

Oddly rhythm is a bit more complicated.
Rhythm is the organization of time
into compelling patterns of long and
short sounds.
Here's a famous melody,
one created by the French
composer Maurice Ravel from
his ballet Bolero of 1928.
There is a tune, a succession of higher
and lower pitches, shown vertically.
And, there is a rhythm
moving left to right.
Now let's strip away pitch and
leave the rhythm alone and
it will look like this,
as we see on our next slide.
But what we hear first at the beginning
of Bolero is not the melody, but
another rhythm, this one.
And it's played by a snare drum.
Now, a snare drum, as you may know,
has no particular pitch.
It just plays a rhythm, pure rhythm.
I'll tap it.
[NOISE] And that's all
the snare drum player does.
So he better like that pattern,
going to be doing it the next 14 and
a half minutes.
Now beneath the snare drum pattern,
low strings play another rhythmic
that provides something of a harmony.
Let's take a look at that now.
Bum.
[MUSIC]
And, so on.
Eventually, the flute enters
adding the enchanting melody.
So now we have three rhythms
operating here, one in the flute,
which also carries the melody, one in
the snare drum, which is a simple, or
pure, rhythm, and the third in the bass,
which is providing something of
a harmony below the melody up above.
So we have three rhythms
that are staying within and
emphasizing the structure of the measure.
Three different rhythms
sounding simultaneously,
three different patterns of longs and
shorts.
Let's give a listen to the South
Korean Philharmonic Orchestra as it
performs this work.
I like the recording engineering here.
It's very easy to hear
the three musical parts.

[MUSIC]
So who's playing the beat here?
Well, no ones actually playing the beat.
About the only time an instrument
plays the beat in music is
when the bass drum in a marching band
plays the beat, or maybe a drummer in
a rock band playing the bass drum
by means of left foot on a pedal.
So how is it then that we hear the beat?
Well, we hear.
[SOUND] Well, our ear,
actually our brain digests
this complex of information and
extrapolates it from it,
a basic structural framework
underlying the music.
It's a kind of platonic meta reality or
overarching structure that no
one actually hears, or
no one actually sees, but it's there.
But we do hear the beat.
And we hear the beats organized
into groups of three.
[SOUND] One, two, three,
one, two, three, and so on.
Bolero is written in triple meter.
We feel the triple meter.
And that's all that really counts.
But if we want confirmation of this
we can look at the musical notation,
particularly the base, where we
see clearly three quarter notes or
the equivalent of three
quarter notes in each measure.
Why do we hear it is triple meter?
To see how that works,
let's turn to a class video demonstration.
[MUSIC]
What, what, what's the key here?
What did you listen to?
How, how many think it's in duple meter?
Raise your hand.
How many think it's in triple meter?
Okay.
Almost everybody thinks
it's in duple meter.
And that's correct.
Now we worked through this
just a little bit once before.
What is it that tells us
that it's in duple meter?
It's the bass.
[MUSIC]
Because it's organizing itself
very strongly in duple patterns.
There's one other interesting
thing in here, this would be.
Well, let, let, let's, let's think through
that in one in one additional way.

And that is.

Notice that in duple meter we
have a strong beat, right.
Strong, weak, strong weak, strong, weak,
strong, weak, strong, weak in that sense.
Or if we have triple it would be strong,
weak, weak, strong, weak, weak.
It would be two weak beats, or
two unstressed beats,
between each strong beat.
We could do this.
[MUSIC]
And we'd have The Waltz of the Bulldog.
>> [LAUGH].
>> It'd be pretty cool to see, actually.
So there it's, I'm simply taking
the Cole Porter piece and
throwing in an extra beat in each measure,
an unstressed beat in each measure, and
it works out pretty well.
Notice, this would be,
Harvard would have had a,
had a field day with this melody if he,
Cole Porter had not done one thing.
He, he, he makes this really rather
snappy by the use of this kind of stuff.
[MUSIC]
We come in on bom, bom, bom, bom, and then
da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
What's that a good example of?
>> Syncopation.
>> Syncopation, yeah.
Term's on the board up there, but
it's a good example of syncopation.
Sort of jumping in ahead of time, cutting
off the beat, getting in there ahead
of time and throwing off the metrical
balance for a very short period of time.
Okay.
Let's see now if you can hear the
difference between duple and triple meter.
I'll play two examples.
[MUSIC]
That's
number
one.
Here's another one.
Which is duple?
Which is triple?
[MUSIC]
Right.
First one was triple.
Second one was duple.
How'd you do?
Well, here's one more.
Let's try another one.
One last, one last one of these.
You'll like it.
First there was music by Handel.
That was this piece.

[MUSIC]
That's our triple meter piece.
Then we had music by Schubert.
This is our duple meter piece.
[MUSIC]
Let's try one other one.
What about this one?
[MUSIC]
And so
on.
Right again.
Triple meter.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND]