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Light Therapy, Rhythms and Body Clock. circadian rhythms, circannual... holistic-online.com | Light Therapy, Rhythms and Body Clock. circadian rhythms, circannual... holisticonline.com | Junctional Rhythm Information - Heart Junctional Rhythm, Accelerated... diseasesatoz.com | Accelerated idioventricular rhythm - Accelerated idioventricular rhythm... women-health-care.com |
For other uses, see Rhythm (disambiguation). Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός – rhythmos, "any measured flow or movement, symmetry") is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events.
[edit] Rhythm in linguistics[edit] Origins of human appreciation of rhythm[edit] Rhythm notation and the oral traditionWorldwide there are many different approaches to passing on rhythmic phrases and patterns, as they exist in traditional music, from generation to generation. [edit] African musicIn the Griot tradition of Africa everything related to music has been passed on orally. Babatunde Olatunji (1927–2003), a Nigerian drummer who lived and worked in the United States, developed a simple series of spoken sounds for teaching the rhythms of the hand drum. He used six vocal sounds: Goon Doon Go Do Pa Ta. There are three basic sounds on the drum, but each can be played with either the left or the right hand. This simple system is now used worldwide, particularly by Djembe players. [edit] Indian musicIndian music has also been passed on orally. Tabla players would learn to speak complex rhythm patterns and phrases before attempting to play them. Sheila Chandra, an English pop singer of Indian descent, made performances based around her singing these patterns. In Indian Classical music, the Tala of a composition is the rhythmic pattern over which the whole piece is structured. [edit] Western musicStandard music notation contains all rhythmic information and is adapted specifically for drums and percussion instruments. The drums are generally used to keep other instruments in 'time'. They do this by supplying beats/strikes in time at a certain pace, i.e. 70 beats per minute (bpm). In Rock music, a drum beat is used to keep a bass/guitar line in time. [edit] TypesIn Western music, rhythms are usually arranged with respect to a time signature, partially signifying a meter. The speed of the underlying pulse is sometimes called the beat. The tempo is a measure of how quickly the pulse repeats. The tempo is usually measured in 'beats per minute' (bpm); 60 bpm means a speed of one beat per second. The length of the meter, or metric unit (usually corresponding with measure length), is usually grouped into either two or three beats, being called duple meter and triple meter, respectively. If each beat is divided by two or four, it is simple meter, if by three (or six) compound meter. According to Pierre Boulez, beat structures beyond four are "simply not natural".[1]. His reference is to western European music.  Syncopated rhythms are rhythms that accent parts of the beat not already stressed by counting. Playing simultaneous rhythms in more than one time signature is called polymeter. See also polyrhythm. In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. Recent work in these areas includes books by Maury Yeston, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, Jonathan Kramer, Christopher Hasty, William Rothstein, and Joel Lester.  Some genres of music make different use of rhythm than others. Most Western music is based on subdivision, while non-Western music uses more additive rhythm. African music makes heavy use of polyrhythms, and Indian music uses complex cycles such as 7 and 13, while Balinese music often uses complex interlocking rhythms. By comparison, a lot of Western classical music is fairly rhythmically (or metrically) simple; it stays in a simple meter such as 4/4 or 3/4 and makes little use of syncopation.
In the 20th century, composers like Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich wrote more rhythmically complex music using odd meters, and techniques such as phasing and additive rhythm. At the same time, modernists such as Olivier Messiaen and his pupils used increased complexity to disrupt the sense of a regular beat, leading eventually to the widespread use of irrational rhythms in New Complexity. This use may be explained by a comment of John Cage's[where?] where he notes that regular rhythms cause sounds to be heard as a group rather than individually; the irregular rhythms highlight the rapidly changing pitch relationships that would otherwise be subsumed into irrelevant rhythmic groupings (Sandow 2004, p.257). LaMonte Young also wrote music in which the sense of a regular beat is absent because the music consists only of long sustained tones (drones). In the 1930s, Henry Cowell wrote music involving multiple simultaneous periodic rhythms and collaborated with Léon Thérémin to invent the Rhythmicon, the first electronic rhythm machine, in order to perform them. Similarly, Conlon Nancarrow wrote for the player piano. [edit] See also[edit] Notes
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[edit] Further reading
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