[MUSIC] Beat and meter are rather easy to understand. Oddly rhythm is a bit more complicated. Rhythm is the organization of time into compelling patterns of long and short sounds. Here's a famous melody, one created by the French composer, Maurice Ravel from his ballet, Bolero of 1928. There's a tune, a succession of higher and lower pitches shown vertically. And there's a rhythm moving left to right. Now let's strip away pitch and leave the rhythm alone. And it will look like this as we see on our next slide. But what we hear first at the beginning of Bolero is not the melody but another rhythm. This one. And it's played by a snare drum. Now a snare drum, as you may know, has no particular pitch. It just plays a rhythm, pure rhythm. I'll tap it. [MUSIC] And that's all the snare drum player does. So he better like that pattern, he's gonna be doing it for the next 14 and a half minutes. Now beneath the snare drum pattern, low strings play another rhythm that provides something of a harmony. Let's take a look at that now. Bum. [MUSIC] And so on. Eventually, the flute enters, adding the enchanting melody. So now we have three rhythms operating here. One in the flute, which also carries the melody. One in the snare drum, which is a simple, or pure rhythm. And a third in the bass, which is providing something of a harmony below the melody up above. So, we have three rhythms that are staying within and emphasizing the structure of the measure. Three different rhythms sounding simultaneously, three different patterns of longs and shorts. Let's give a listen to the South Korean Phil Harmonic Orchestra as it performs this work. I like the recording engineering here, it's very easy to hear the three musical parts. [MUSIC] So who's playing the beat here? Well, no one is actually playing the beat. About the only time an instrument plays the beat in the music is when the bass drum in a marching band plays the beat. Or maybe a drummer in a rock band playing the bass drum by means of left foot on a pedal. So how is it then that we hear the beat? Well, we hear. [MUSIC] Well, our ear, actually our brain, digest this complex of information and extrapolates it from it a basic structural framework underlying the music. So kinda platonic mental reality over arching structure that no one actually hears. No one actually sees but it's there. But we do hear the beat. And we hear the beats organized into groups of three. One two three, one two three, and so on. Bollero is written in triple meter. We feel the triple meter, and that's all that really counts. But if we want confirmation of this, we can look at the musical notation, particularly the base, where we see clearly three quarter notes or the equivalent of three quarter notes in each measure. Why do we hear? It is triple meter. To see how that works, let's turn to a class video demonstration. [MUSIC] What's the key here? What do you listen to? How many think it's in duple meter? Raise your hand. How many think it's in triple meter? Okay, almost everybody thinks it's a duple meter, and that's correct. Now, we worked through this just a little bit once before, what is it that tells us that it's in duple meter? It's the? >> Bass. >> Bass. [MUSIC] Because it's organizing itself very strongly in duple patterns. There's one other interesting thing in here. This would be, well, let's think through that in one additional way. And that is, notice that in duple meter we have a strong beat. Right? Strong, weak, strong, weak, strong, weak, strong, weak, in that sense. Or if we have triple, it would be strong weak, weak, strong, weak, weak. There would be two weak beats, or two unstressed beats between each strong beat. We could do this. [MUSIC] And we'd have the waltz of the bulldog. It'd be pretty cool to see actually. >> [LAUGH] >> So there, I'm simply taking the Cole Porter piece and throwing in an extra beat in each measure, an unstressed beat in each measure, and it works out pretty well. Notice, this would be, Harvard would've had a field day with this melody if Cole Porter had not done one thing. He makes this really rather snappy by the use of this kind of stuff. [MUSIC] We're coming in on bum, bum, bum, bum, and it's dun, dun, dun, dun, da-dun, dun, dun, da-dun. What's that a good example of? Syncopation. Yeah, terms on the board up there. But it's a good example of syncopation. Sort of jumping in ahead of time, cutting off the beginning in there ahead of time. And throwing off the metrical balance for a very short period of time. Okay, let's see now if you can hear the difference between duple and triple meter. I'll play two examples. [MUSIC] That's number one, here's another one. Which is duple, which is triple? [MUSIC] Right. The first one was triple, second one was duple. How'd you do? Well here's one more. Let's try another, one last one of these. You'll like it. First there was music by Hendel. That was this piece. [MUSIC] That's our triple meter piece and we had music by Schubert. This is our duple meter piece. [MUSIC] Let's try one other one. What about this one? [MUSIC] And so on. Right again. Triple meter.
