Reply To: Artificial Heart discussion
@Angelastic yes absolutely there can be a difference between 3/4 and 6/8. Interesting that you’d pick those actually – the convention for music notated in 6/8 is quite different to that in 3/4, but 3/8 is more like 6/8… these don’t always apply, but they often do.
3/4 is straightforward: there are three beats in the bar. The first one tends to be stronger, as with the first beat of the bar in most music, but there’s nothing odd going on.
6/8 is different, and this tends to apply to anything like 6/16, 6/4, 6/2… the latter might be just straightforward six beat bars (there are notational conventions around that distinction) but they will generally be what’s called ‘compound time’. Effectively, a 6/8 bar actually has TWO beats in it, not six. Each beat is divided into three, so you get this sort of rolling triple feeling which tends to flow very nicely (jigs are conventionally notated in 6/8).
This is not a new thing – this kind of distinction’s been in music since people first started notating time signatures, which they did before they’d even invented bar lines. Of course, you can have a six-beat bar that’s not made up of two groups of three – conventions in how you write the music down show where this applies.
I really like 6/8, and also 9/8, the time signature of the slip jig, which is a great three-inside-three sort of pattern.
There are other fun time signatures of course, and another one mentioned in relation to Fraud – five beats to the bar! This is a kind of time signature called an irregular time signature, because bars have uneven gaps between the important beats. In 6/8, you get a strong beat every third quaver. In 4/4, you get a strong beat every other crotchet. In 5/8, you get a strong beat on the first and fourth quavers of the bar, so a gap of two followed by a gap of one, which can make the music sound slightly lopsided.
Or you might have a strong beat on the first and third instead – there’s no rule about whether the three is at the start or the end, and composers freely play around with that within the same piece. In longer irregular bars, like 7/8 or 11/8 or some unusual forms of 9/8, the short and long gaps can be anywhere at all, and 7/8 although usually made of 3, 2 and 2, can sometimes be 3, 3, 1 instead.
However, in Fraud it just seems to be a short bar, so it doesn’t emphasise the irregularity very much, instead just surprising you by hitting another bar-starting beat earlier than you expected. Changing the length of bars is great fun 🙂
I know that’s not very coherent, but it might give you an idea…