An Introduction to Rhythm
A Feature by Camdog

If you ventured beyond the world of Notate after reading last month's feature, you no doubt noticed that the symbols in most music making programs look quite a bit different than the various sizes of bars used to display notes in Notate. The lengths of bars in Notate are great, because they offer an obvious visual representation of the duration of the note: the longer the bar, the longer the note is held. However, this is simply not the way most music is written. Fortunately, most music is written in such a way that you can easily see the note duration just by looking at it; you simply have to memorize how different musical symbols correspond with different durations.

Before we can discuss the specifics, we need to understand how duration is measured in music. Duration in music is measured in beats. Beats are easy for most people to understand. Try listening to a piece of music and nodding your head or tapping your foot along with it. Congratulations! You've just been measuring beats. Each nod or tap corresponds with one beat. The more astute among you may have realized that you nod along with music differently depending on how fast or slow the song is. The speed of a song is called the 'tempo', and the fact it can change shows that a beat is a relative measure that changes depending on the song. You can, in fact, make a song faster or slower by indicating the tempo, and it will still otherwise be written exactly the same way.

Got it? Good. Now we can take a look at how durations are shown in traditional musical notation. Along with pictures of notes, you'll also see pictures of rests, which imply a duration of silence. In notate, you do this simply by not placing any notes in the silence, but in traditional notation, you need to define in explictly.

A whole note and rest. These indicate a duration of four beats.

Two half notes and a half rest. These indicate a duration of two beats. (The direction of the stems don't matter, and are drawn in whichever direction fits better on the staff)

Two quarter notes and a quarter rest. These indicate a duration of one beat.

Two eighth notes and an eighth rest. These indicate a duration of a half of a beat.

A series of eighth notes together may also be connected by a bar.

From then on, the notes get half as short, and are named as half the fraction of the note longer than it. For example, the next note is a sixteenth note (half of an eighth note - remember, these are fractions, people!), and it is half as long as an eighth note, or a quarter of a beat long. The next shortest note is a thirty-second note, and then a sixty-fourth note, etc. If a note has a dot next to it, that indicates it is fifty percent longer than normal. For instance, a dotted half note is three beats long, and a dotted quarter note is one and a half beats long. All shorter notes are drawn the same way as the note preceding it, but with an extra flag on the stem (or an extra bar, in the case of a series of them). For example, a sixteenth note will have two flags on the stem, instead of the one flag the eighth note has.

So what is the point of all this? Why bother to memorize these arcane symbols? Simply because this is the way 90% of all music is written. This knowledge will help you understand what another composer has written, and help you see what exactly is going on with the notes in the music. With this knowledge, you should download the sheet music of something you like (or midi file, if you have a program that allows for editing midi files) and check out the rhythms written there. From that point, you can build on those rhythmic ideas, get a handle on what sounds like what, and soon develop your own great rhythms to work with the awesome melodies you created after reading last month's tutorial!

Tune in next time for a further discussion of rhythm, and how rhythmic patterns are grouped in most western music.