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!
