what are your favourites?
We will rock you
Can never think of any when I’m put on the spot like this
I don’t know much about music. Is The Impression That I Get in 4/4?
Don’t really listen to 4/4 music
Alright, maynard james keenan
I’m having flashbacks of Tool fans falling over themselves to declare Parabola as the worst song on Lateralus because of the 4/4 time signature.
Why is the second number always 4 or 8 in time signatures? Why can’t you have 7/3 or 4/11?
we were all better yesterday, mate
because the second number refers to what KIND of beats they are, and the only notes available in standard modern musical notation are full note (semibreve), half note (minim), quarter note (crotchet), eighth note (quaver) and so on. You could conceivably have 7/3, but your “third-note” would be filling the same role as a half-note or quarter-note, so it would sound just the same as 7/2 or 7/4 so why bother.
That’s pretty right, it is somewhat arbitrary. 4/4 means four crotchet beats to the bar, but if you replaced every note by its half equivalent (replace crotchets with quavers, quavers with semiquavers, etc, you would have four quaver beats to the bar and it would be 4/8. If you then halved the tempo it would sound exactly the same as the original (“tempo” being defined as the number of crotchets per minute). The notes you use to represent the music are largely a matter of convenience; it’s the relation between them that matters.
A “Semibreve” is sometimes called a “whole tone”, and I imagine that term dates from when music mostly consisted of singing. Perhaps it was related to how long a note could be comfortably held by a vocalist.