RHYTHM 01: Current Music Tech’s (ab)use of Time-Signatures
In western notation, there is a complicated relationship between note & rest values, time-signatures, and the felt beats. Beginners are shown a note/rest value-tree in ‘common time’ (4/4) where a whole-note fills a 4-beat measure (thus giving the 4-beat unit unearned, universal significance). The note names are thus tied to a 4-beat unit, which adds a layer of complication, requiring multiple fractions to explain note durations. A 1/2 note gets 2 beats, an 1/8th note gets a 1/2 beat, a 1/4 gets 1 beat, an 1/8th note triplet (which should have been called a 1/12 note), gets 1/3 of a beat. Messy. Yet these visual note and rest value symbols as they are defined in 4/4 time are often internalized by musicians.
Outside of common time, our note and rest values are arbitrary and can change with respect to the tempo beat; where the time-signature scales the values in a number of ways. It’s further complicated by the ambiguity of the time-signatures themselves. Putting other numbers in the denominator can scale the note/rest values. E.g., a 2 in the denominator CAN (but not always) mean that a symbol which looks like a 1/2 note would now only get 1 beat. An 8 in the denominator can mean several things: that either an 1/8th or a dotted-1/4 or a 1/4 gets a beat.
Despite the arbitrary, non-hard-wired values of note & rest symbols, and the ambiguity of time-signatures themselves; it seems odd that modern music-making software has embraced this as the de facto standard for how to define and organize time.
A simpler and more powerful approach allows users to control how many beats are in a measure and how those beats are divided, using a 1-beat unit rather than a 4-beat unit. Ideally, those structural settings could change dynamically throughout the work. Note values can much more easily be described as a ratio of steps per tempo beats. So steps of one beat are 1:1. Steps of 4 beats are 1:4, 3 steps per beat (1/8th triplets, or 1/12) would simply be 3:1. It’s more logical and intuitive, and leaves behind all the pointless complication of a 4-beat unit.