additive meter

Additive rhythm features nonidentical or irregular durational groups following one another at two levels, within the bar and between bars or groups of bars. This type of rhythm is also referred to in musicological literature by the Turkish word aksak, which means "limping".

The origins of the "additive process" lie in Indian music, and the basic idea is that the technique takes a bar of music containing a certain group of notes and repeats it several times. To this group is then added an additional note, and then another, and so on.

Simple meters are meters in which the beat divides into two, and then further subdivides into four. Duple meters have groupings of two beats, triple meters have groupings of three beats, and quadruple meters have groupings of four beats.

Below are audio examples of common meters with their natural accents or beat hierarchy:

• Duple Meter – 2 beats per measure – i.e. Sousa's “Stars and Stripes”
• Triple Meter – 3 beats per measure – i.e. Strauss “Blue Danube Waltz”
• Quadruple Meter – 4 beats per measure – i.e. Queen “Love of My Life”

Additive rhythms are rhythms played one after another in a cycle. So e.g. alternating 3/4 with 4/4 is additive. Sometimes you have a more irregular pattern such as a few bars of 3/4 now and again in the middle of a piece in 4/4. That's a mixed meter, the more general term.

4/4 The most common meter in music is 4/4. It's so popular that it is often referred to as “common time”. This meter is used in a variety of genres, however most frequently in rock, blues, country, funk, and pop music.

For example, 10 can be thought of as made up of 5 and 5, 6 and 4, 7 and 3 and so on. This is sometimes referred to as “additive composition”, which refers to the way numbers can be split into parts and recombined to solve problems more easily.

If there are three beats in a bar, the meter is described as triple, and if there are four beats in a bar, the meter is described as quadruple. If the beats are normally divided into two parts, the meter is described as simple . If the beats are normally divided into three parts, the meter is described as compound .

This list indicates how many feet (each of which contains one also beat, or stressed syllable) appear in each type of meter:

• Monometer: one foot/beat per line.
• Dimeter: two feet/beats per line.
• Trimeter: three feet/beats per line.
• Tetrameter: four feet/beats per line.

The definition of duple meter, sometimes referred to as duple time, is a meter that has two beats per measure. The first beat of the measure is the strong beat, and the second beat of the measure is the weak beat.

A meter is any device that measures and may record an electrical or magnetic quantity, such as voltage or current. For example, an ammeter or voltmeter are kinds of meters. Use of such a device may be termed "metering" or you might say the quantity being measured is being "metered".

Meter describes the rhythm (or pattern of beats) in a line of poetry. Meter is a combination of the number of beats and the arrangement of stressed and non-stressed syllables in each line. Iambic pentameter is a primary example of meter.