Discussion Main / UncommonTime

The stranglers' Golden Brown is is a non-standard time, i can tell that much, but i'm not nearly good enough at music to be able to define it properly.

Is the Wild Woods theme from Mario Kart 8 actually in 10/8? I can count it in 10/16, but that's absurdly fast and it makes more sense to count it as 5/8 to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcxqVRLEWI Remember this song, which has been a meme for some time? There are parts that are 5/4 instead of 4/4.

The list's getting a little long and I'm concerned about it crashing for some users. I'm thinking about setting it to auto-compressed folders. Does anyone have any objections?

Cutting for not fitting the strict definition of this trope (this particular rhythm has its own name, by the way):

• Speaking of Bernstein ... "America" from West Side Story alternates between a compound duple (6/8-ish) and triple (3/4-ish) meter on a measure-by-measure basis. The More You Know: when a song contains something that sounds like a rhythmic shift but doesn't print a time-signature change, it's called a "hemiola."

These examples are just poorly written, and I don't believe the first one is valid. The implications are wrong, too: Sondheim songs are far more likely to be in Common Time (though often with syncopations) than Uncommon Time.

• Stephen Sondheim loves him some uncommon time.
  • Into The Woods is particularly maddening.
  • Try, just fucking try to find the beat to The Ballad of Booth in Assassins.

Question deleted because I figured out the answer.

Is there some video available, somewhere, to illustrate this whole "time" thing, music audio combined with some kind of animation to show the actual "beats" or whatever they're called? I get "waltz" and I think I get 4/4 too, but not everything else. It's just letters and numbers on a screen, pure text, and I can't connect that to what I'm hearing.

The whole "Useful Notes" section is vexing me somewhat, as the information is to my knowledge incorrect:

The BOTTOM number of the time signature (the second number when written as text) is descriptive of the LENGTH of the beats. 8 is a quaver (eighth note), 4 is a crotchet (quarter note). This number is unrelated to the top number.

Time signatures such as 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 are SIMPLE time signatures, which means the beats are subdivided by 2. In simple time with a 4 as the bottom number, every beat is a crotchet (quarter note) beat, which is made up of TWO quavers (eighth notes).

Time signatures such as 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 are COMPOUND time signatures, defined by each beat being subdivided by 3. In compound time with an 8 as the bottom number, every beat is a dotted crotchet beat, which is made up of a crotchet (quarter note) tied to a quaver (eighth note), which adds up to THREE quavers. This is why compound time signatures are identified by a number that is a multiple of 3 LARGER than 3 as the top number, commonly 6, 9 and 12.

Time signatures such as 5/4, 7/8 and 13/8 are IRREGULAR time signatures. The beats are not easily subdivided. Irregular time signatures are not easy to pick up from listening to them, and upon hearing them we will tend to subdivide them into easier to comprehend chunks. Example: "Golden Brown" by The Stranglers is partly in 13/4. By listening to the song's intro, it feels like a lilting waltz, mostly in 3/4, which is then thrown out by an extra beat every fourth bar. It sounds and feels as though the intro is in fact 3/4, 3/4, 3/4, 4/4. It doesn't feel like 13/4, likely because we're not used to hearing 13 beats to a bar. Irregular rhythms are also called Bulgarian rhythms.

It is the TOP number in any time signature which is the important number for working out whether the time signature is simple regular, compound regular or irregular.

Furthermore, the descriptions of duple and triple time are also incorrect. Duple time means there are two beats to a bar, either simple beats OR compound beats. Therefore 2/4 (two crotchet beats) AND 6/8 (two dotted crotchet beats) are both duple time signatures. Similarly, 3/4 and 9/8 are both triple time signatures, and 4/4 and 12/8 are both quadruple time signatures.

I'm new to editing tropes and I don't want to amend the useful notes if there is good reason for them being incorrect to me, e.g. actually called different things in different parts of the world. Can anyone back me up on my thinking?

I've often thought that it might be interesting for someone to write a tune about pi — in 22/7 time of course. Being not a musician myself, I don't know if this time signature is feasible or what it would sound like. (Although I did recognise the 5/4 of Everything's Alright, and the 9/8 of Apocalypse in 9/8 also seems fairly obvious to me.)

"A measure of 3/4 waltz is counted "One and Two and Three and," but a measure of 6/8 is counted "One and a Two and a". 6/8 is not the equivalent as 3/4, it's the equivalent of 2/4. (Why it had to be done this way, nobody knows.)"

I'm cutting the sentence in parentheses, because we do know — a 6/8 bar has two dotted-crotchet beats, so pedantically it should be 2/(8/3), but since that's hard to read the much simpler 6/8 is used. The convention that 3/4 always means bars with a length of three crotches or six quavers grouped into three twos arises simply because 3/4 and 6/8 are both common and it's extremely useful to have this way of distinguishing them.

I'm kinda new here...Should we make a Troper Tales section if we made a song in uncommon time?