On Nov 3, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Doug Wyatt wrote:
>
> On Nov 2, 2009, at 8:22 , Paul Davis wrote:
>
>> This is quite a strange assumption. I've spoken to several experienced
>> musicians and this is absolutely the opposite of their sense of
>> musical time. If the meter shifts to 8, then a beat is an 1/8th note,
>> not a 1/4. If you were working on a piece entirely in 5/8 time, you
>> would not count in 1/4's but 1/8ths.
>
> I think the docs are referring to common practice in software influenced by the design of Standard MIDI Files, not about what's common practice amongst musicians.
>
> Think of a measure of 7/8 as being 3.5 beats long. This isn't the "canonical" way that a musician would think of it, but it makes perfect sense to a drummer contemplating polyrhythms, and it does have the advantage of a "beat" remaining constant in duration across meter changes (unless there are also tempo changes).
FWIW, in supercollider I implemented constant beat values instead of constant note values and got complaints in the opposite direction (beats change duration across meter changes), so I think neither way is inherently superior.
Also FWIW, I remember an electronic music conference ca 1984 where Yamaha was announcing their TX816 (FM synth rack) and some composing software to go with it based on a constant value *measures* having 1680 ticks or something like that. That got the composers sitting in the auditorium up in arms!
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