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Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

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Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#31

Post by sparky_z »

greglindahl wrote: post #26
jdietrich wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to confuse yourself, try figuring out the time signature for Kiss By A Rose by Seal. https://open.spotify.com/track/3YKptz29AsOlm7WAVnztBh

It's a waltz. Normally waltzes are notated in 3/4.

Why do you say it's a waltz? The intended audience is clearly not ballroom dancers.

You might argue that anything in "waltz time" is a waltz, but then your argument becomes circular. You would be saying it's a waltz because it's in 3/4 time and it's in 3/4 time because it's a waltz.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#32

Post by tmh88j »

gp7 wrote: post #30
aftbit wrote: post #2

I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.

Time signatures are about writing and reading music. A beat being in 3 or 6 is independent from the time signature, which is whatever the transcriber thought best (you can always count a song in 6 in 3.) A piece in 4 might have pervasive use of triplets, so it would make it more readable to notate in 12/8 rather than 4/4, but there is no triplet-pervasiveness threshold for when to prefer one over the other. Likewise,…

As someone who casually plays the guitar and piano and understands the basics of time signatures, your explanation left me more confused and almost forgot what I already know. You seem like a very knowledgeable person, but don't seem to realize that what is common knowledge to you is meaningless technical jargon to everyone else.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#33

Post by skywhopper »

aftbit wrote: post #2

I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.

The full time signature is arbitrary, and partially related to how the notes are written. It's wrong to put too much weight on "6/8" vs "3/4" per se. There are conventions that have developed in western music as to which time signature matches which natural beat pattern, but there's nothing _inherent_ in the time signatures that's important.

Instead, I find it useful to think about combinations and layers of twos and threes. So the different being talked about in this article is about whether the beat pattern is more of three groups of two, or two groups of three. Convention has mapped those, typically, to 3/4 and 6/8 respectively, but again that's entirely arbitrary.

Likewise 9/8 time is usually three groups of three. 4/4 is two groups of two (though the second two often have slightly less emphasis, whereas 2/4 time is just single groupings of two). 7/8 is a group of three and two groups of two (could be 2-2-3, or 3-2-2, or 2-3-2). 5/4 or 5/8 is a group of two and a group of three.

But ultimately time signatures are just a convenient way to hint at the beat pattern expected, and to give a framework in which to write the musical notation. The actual _music_ is not so easily transcribed.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#34

Post by jancsika »

Bug: rapid calls to 3/4 get parsed as 6/8

1. Take the 3/4 example and convince yourself you fully understand the difference between 3/4 time and 6/8 time.

2. Let your ostensible understanding lead you to listen to a waltz.

3. Get familiar enough with the waltz that you can sing along with the melody.

4. Now ask yourself: does the melody sound like it divide up into groups of measures, or is the melody just freely moving around in no discernible pattern?

5. Realize very quickly that the melody divides up into groups of measures.

6. Realize that the melody very likely divides up into groups of two measures to build larger phrases.

7. Realize that many waltzes move at a rapid tempo so that each measure of 3/4 moves by quite quickly.

8. Realize that regularly recurring fast 3/4 measures which divide up perceptually into two-measure groups sounds exactly like... 6/8.

This bug affects all CPUs.

The only currently known workarounds are genre literacy and knowledge of notational convention.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#35

Post by rhapsodic »

jancsika wrote: post #34

Bug: rapid calls to 3/4 get parsed as 6/8 1. Take the 3/4 example and convince yourself you fully understand the difference between 3/4 time and 6/8 time. 2. Let your ostensible understanding lead you to listen to a waltz. 3. Get familiar enough with the waltz that you can sing along with the melody. 4. Now ask yourself: does the melody sound like it divide up into groups of measures, or is the melody just freely mov…

My understanding is rudimentary compared to yours, but I learned (perhaps incorrectly) long ago that for 3/4 time (waltz time) you can count:

ONE two three TWO two three ONE two three TWO two three

and that indeed sounds more similar to the article's 6/8 example than its 3/4 example.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#36

Post by gp7 »

tmh88j wrote: post #32
gp7 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time signatures are about writing and reading music. A beat being in 3 or 6 is independent from the time signature, which is whatever the transcriber thought best (you can always count a song in 6 in 3.) A piece in 4 might have pervasive use of triplets, so it would make it more readable to notate in 12/8 rather than 4/4, but there is no triplet-pervasiveness threshold for when to prefer one over the other. Likewise,…

As someone who casually plays the guitar and piano and understands the basics of time signatures, your explanation left me more confused and almost forgot what I already know. You seem like a very knowledgeable person, but don't seem to realize that what is common knowledge to you is meaningless technical jargon to everyone else.

That’s fair, but my assumption was that someone reading my reply would also have read the others, and I didn’t want to repeat what has already been said.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#37

Post by jballanc »

skywhopper wrote: post #33
aftbit wrote: post #2

I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.

The full time signature is arbitrary, and partially related to how the notes are written. It's wrong to put too much weight on "6/8" vs "3/4" per se. There are conventions that have developed in western music as to which time signature matches which natural beat pattern, but there's nothing _inherent_ in the time signatures that's important. Instead, I find it useful to think about combinations and layers of twos and…

One of my favorite songs for helping to explain the importance and differences between time signatures is "Question!" by System of a Down (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENBv2i88g6Y). The intro is 9/8 (as a 3-2-2-2 grouping), followed by a section in 5/4. The verses are the same 9/8, except for regular jumps to 6/8 (during the phrase "Are you dreaming?"). The chorus is 6/4, with repeats of the same 5/4 section from the intro. The bridge is a mash-up of the 5/4 again with jumps between 9/8 and 3/4 and the outro is 4/4 back to a final 9/8 section.

It's not always easy to pick out what specific signature is being played at every point in the song, but the "suspended" feeling of hanging beats as the signature changes is very obvious.

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#38

Post by fenomas »

Side note: If you're on Chrome and you check the JS console, you'll see that the audio for this page will stop working in October when Chrome reinstates the ill-considered audio policy they rolled out in May and then removed because it broke a bunch of sites.

The audio policy in question:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

HN discussion when the policy was instated/removed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079724

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#39

Post by seanyeh »

pishpash wrote: post #22
quadrangle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called convention . By convention (not by anything about the notation itself), 6/8 is used for compound time with 2 significant beats.

You're confusing cause and effect. If you have compound time with 2 significant beats, you should see 6/8. If you see 6/8, it does not imply there are 2 significant beats.

6/8 does imply 2 strong beats (at least in western classical music tradition).

Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures

#40

Post by nerflad »

DavidPiper wrote: post #13
nerflad wrote: post #12

There is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8 unless you are trying to decide on which one makes your score easier to read. It's just different ways of conceptualizing the phrase. Mathematically (and therefore rhythmically) they are the same, of course. Maybe the site is trying to make some other differentiation but it didn't work at all in Firefox. (Source: I am a professional drummer)

This is not the case. While some inexperienced composers/arrangers/scorers may transcribe 3/4 pieces in 6/8 to make the score look better, it is a fundamentally incorrect thing to do. 3/4 has one significant beat per bar: ONE two three | ONE two three - Think any waltz you've ever heard. 6/8 has two siginficant beats per bar: ONE two three Four five six | ONE to three Four five six - Think Follow the Yellow Brick Roa…

> ONE two three | ONE two three

This phrase also has two significant beats. There's just a barline in the middle. See my point?

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