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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

#81

Post by theoh »

pishpash wrote: post #19
theoh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The denominator is not as important as the numerator. (The Wikipedia page on time signatures makes that clear) One thing about 6/8 that is not literally communicated by the notation is the rhythm: the first and fourth beats of the bar are stressed. But not equally, because that would be indistinguishable from 3/8.

The denominator is not important at all, though there seems to be a convention of keeping the rhythm fraction around 1, so 6/8 instead of 6/4, but say, 5/4 instead of 5/8. And 6/8 says nothing about the beat structure within the 6 beats. You're stating the most common occurrence, but that's not the definition of 6/8.

You're not the only one in the comments on this article who has asserted that some pieces in 6/8 have a different pattern of stresses. So I'm totally prepared to hear about it, even if basic music theory doesn't cover those cases.

The point stands that time signatures are not rational numbers (as you acknowledge, the unit of the denumerator can be scaled) so 3/4 and 6/8 aren't part of some equivalence class. They have different meanings which are only sustained by the presence of a cyclical pattern of stressed notes. So if there's some music theory you can link to which elaborates on all the possible different rhythmic patterns of 6/8 vs 3/4, that would provide examples of the distinction we both agree exists.

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

#82

Post by gooseyard »

pogimabus wrote: post #68
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)

As a musician, the reactions to almost every post on hacker news involving music ends up both cracking me up and serving as a healthy reminder of the arrogance and hubris around here. In all my time I've never met another musician/composer who tried to convince me that there is some kind of fundamental rythmic difference between 2/3 and 6/8 time, yet here we have scores of people who are fighting for the idea as if i…

thank you from the depths of my musician heart.

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

#83

Post by quadrangle »

nerflad wrote: post #40
DavidPiper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The point is that when someone directly compares 6/8 and 3/4, the implication is that the tactus (the place you feel the primary beat) is supposed to be different.

Of course you can take 3/4 music that happens to use a lot of two-bar structures and play it with the same feel as the same thing notated as 6/8.

But the point of comparing the two is not to highlight that case where the same music could be written either way. The point is to describe how if you take the same 6 8th-notes and give them a 3×2 feel, it's musically different from a 2×3 feel.

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

#84

Post by quadrangle »

nerflad wrote: post #43
quadrangle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention . You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then y…

(1) 2 3 | (1) 2 3 and (1) 2 3 (4) 5 6 are rhythmically identical. You're only conceptualizing them differently. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to write this myopic and extremely condescending explanation of my area of study. I will be sure to return the favor someday.

The whole point of the original post and of the lesson describing 3/4 vs 6/8 was not to compare those two notations that indeed are effectively interchangeable.

The point was to compare (1) & (2) & (3) & to the different accent pattern of (1) 2 3 (4) 5 6.

Anyway, even in the case where you are instead counting the 8ths of 6/8 with the same timing as the quarters of 3/4, the 3/4 more readily allows the possibility of odd-numbers of measures in phrases.

That's like how 2/4 and 4/4 are truly identical if the notes are the same (the same son in either time signature is unchanged), but only in 2/4 can you readily have 5-measure sections (i.e. 10 quarter notes) as phrases.

Anyway, there's obviously some miscommunication between us. I assume you actually would agree with everything I'm saying if we were discussing in person. But your original post here will read to many people here as making the claim that there's no distinction between:

3/4 A E C E C E (all 8ths)

and

6/8 A E C E C E (all 8ths)

whereas the whole point of the original article was to describe that these identical timings have different feel because of the different accent structure.

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

#85

Post by quadrangle »

nerflad wrote: post #55
UncleMeat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have different hierarchies. In typical 3/4, the first beat of each measure is given equal weight. In typical 6/8, the first beat is given a bit more weight than the fourth beat. Same reason why we treat 2/4 and 4/4 differently.

Who's we? Your decision to give certain beats more or less emphasis is a subjective one. You can glean absolutely no information about a piece from the way the rhythm is subdivided, except maybe the intended tempo.

Perhaps you work in an idiom that has no connection to the conventions of the notation system…?

So, for example, lots of pop/rock music gets notated rather arbitrarily in practice because it's mostly about the feel from recordings anyway. It's common in that world to see what classical convention would call incorrect notation. And since the core notes all work still and you can go by the feel from the sound you know, it doesn't really matter.

But the classical conventions include ideas that the subjective accents you describe are in fact implied by certain time-signatures.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

dahart wrote: post #73
quadrangle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention . You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then y…

> You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention. Huh, maybe you are violently agreeing with @nerflad? I read the parent comment to mean that convention is the only thing that matters. > You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Why the snark and personal attack? You have no idea what @nerflad understands intelle…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by quadrangle »

yesenadam wrote: post #48
quadrangle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention . You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then y…

You write, I'm not sure why, as if you are an imposing genius addressing someone with grave intellectual disabilities. It's unfathomable to me by what process you decided our drummer friend is in denial of, has no intellectual understanding of, the bleeding obvious. What you say is mostly the exceedingly basic needlessly expressed in a long-winded way. But perhaps I don't 'intellectually understand' it either.

I was not intending to come across condescendingly, but I'll totally accept guilt for being not careful enough in that regard.

I was replying to:

> There is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8

Which is simply wrong. There's no difference in the number of 8th notes. And the same music can be written and felt when written as two bars of 3/4 with quarter notes versus one half-speed bar of 6/8. But that's a much more qualified point.

There is a distinction, and it's not in the notation itself but in what the notation means.

To say there's no difference is like saying present tense and past tense of "read" has no difference in pronunciation. Of course, the plain letters fail to capture the difference, and the difference can be confused at times, and is just a matter of convention. In the case of 3/4 and 6/8, they have a different accent structure, and thus a different musical feeling by convention, and discussing that difference was the only point of the article that this comment was relating to.

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

#88

Post by quadrangle »

nerflad wrote: post #51
nerflad wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In an effort not to be snarky, my point is that rhythm is fractal and these are essentially just two different levels of magnification. You're absolutely right that there are conventions and implications in how they are written, but the thing about conventions (let's use a software term: "best practices") is that people's opinions on what they are tend to be heterogeneous. As a jazz musician, to me the denominator is…

I agree with you, probably 100% at the end of the day. But I don't agree with your first post that seemed to tell readers that there was no distinction.

The convention is that these two time signatures stand-in for two different actual perceptually different music feelings.

The "tactus" (the place we feel the beat) certainly can be subjectively moved to different levels in the hierarchy. Furthermore, you're right that the bottom number is basically just a notation preference (6/8 and 6/16 are effectively identical, though nobody uses the latter).

But the whole point of anyone describing the difference between 6/8 and 3/4 is that they are using the convention to describe the actual feel difference between dividing the same amount of time into 2 vs 3, the hemiola issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiola

I basically was taking issue with seeing a reply to a post that was highlighting this difference that is a real perceptual one (not just a notational one, but described, unfortunately, with focus on notation) with the claim "there is no difference".

I apologize for the aspects of my reply that were ad hominem instead of just critiquing the post itself.

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

#89

Post by quadrangle »

dahart wrote: post #73
quadrangle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention . You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then y…

> You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention. Huh, maybe you are violently agreeing with @nerflad? I read the parent comment to mean that convention is the only thing that matters. > You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Why the snark and personal attack? You have no idea what @nerflad understands intelle…

Apparently, there was mostly miscommunication and the two of us probably agree entirely at the end of the day. The ad hominem aspects of my post weren't warranted really, and I don't care to explain why I fell into it in this case. I didn't mean to be snarky or violent or anything.

Anyway, the post I was replying to didn't say that the difference is due to convention, it asserted the difference didn't exist.

And I stand by my points about rhythm (which I think @nerflad would agree with in the end incidentally).

The "strong and weak" part from Wikipedia only exists in music in the mind of a person. It's not musically strong or weak based on physics of sound waves. Whether something is loud or quiet can be relevant to describing rhythm generically, but music is 100% subjective.

Human beings predictably experience certain musical things in certain ways, especially those from the same music cultures. But a full 100% of everything in music is only music when there are listeners (or just imaginers) having a subjective experience. Otherwise, there is no music. Pressure waves in air or dots on paper are not music.

I don't care what Google's dictionary says. Describing a trite, pithy one-sentence thing for a complex concept is necessarily going to be simplistic.

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

#90

Post by nerflad »

quadrangle wrote: post #88
nerflad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an effort not to be snarky, my point is that rhythm is fractal and these are essentially just two different levels of magnification. You're absolutely right that there are conventions and implications in how they are written, but the thing about conventions (let's use a software term: "best practices") is that people's opinions on what they are tend to be heterogeneous. As a jazz musician, to me the denominator is…

I agree with you, probably 100% at the end of the day. But I don't agree with your first post that seemed to tell readers that there was no distinction. The convention is that these two time signatures stand-in for two different actual perceptually different music feelings. The "tactus" (the place we feel the beat) certainly can be subjectively moved to different levels in the hierarchy. Furthermore, you're right tha…

> I basically was taking issue with seeing a reply to a post that was highlighting this difference that is a real perceptual one (not just a notational one, but described, unfortunately, with focus on notation) with the claim "there is no difference".

It is impossible to quantify or intellectually stratify feelings and perceptions. All I have to say is "I feel it differently" and now your stratification is incomplete. But you can say without a doubt that 3÷4 === 6÷8.

Of course I am aware of the conventional approach to playing 6/8 that results in this perception that beats 1 and 4 are not of exactly equal weight, and of all the different ways you can play two against three, three against four and so on. Polyrhythm doesn't stop at hemiola by the way. Are you also feeling five against three, seven against five, etc.?

I can show you examples of music in 6 where you may be unable to find the downbeat at all. So you can't say for certain how I or anybody else is going to hear it in every case. These prejudicial approaches to music cause closed ears.

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