rhythm

rhythm, in music, is the organization of sounds in time. More specifically, it refers to patterns of duration (long and short sounds) that occur within a regular underlying pulse, or beat. Rhythm is fundamental to all music.

In its most general sense, rhythm (Greek rhythmos, derived from rhein, “to flow”) is an ordered alternation of contrasting elements. Nonetheless, attempts to define rhythm in music have produced much disagreement, partly because rhythm has often been identified with one or more of its constituent, but not wholly separate, elements, such as accent, meter, and tempo. The notion of rhythm also occurs in other arts (e.g., poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture) as well as in nature (e.g., biological rhythms), and as in the closely related subjects of verse and meter, opinions differ widely, at least among poets and linguists, on the nature and movement of rhythm. Theories requiring “periodicity” as the sine qua non of rhythm are opposed by theories that include in it even nonrecurrent configurations of movement, as in prose or plainchant.

Elements of rhythm

Unlike a painting or a piece of sculpture, which are compositions in space, a musical work is a composition dependent upon time. Rhythm is music’s pattern in time. Whatever other elements a given piece of music may have (e.g., patterns in pitch or timbre), rhythm is the one indispensable element of all music. Rhythm can exist without melody, as in the drumbeats of so-called primitive music, but melody cannot exist without rhythm. In music that has both harmony and melody, the rhythmic structure cannot be separated from them. Plato’s observation that rhythm is “an order of movement” provides a convenient analytical starting point.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Tempo

The pace of the fundamental beat is called tempo (Italian: “time”). The expressions slow tempo and quick tempo suggest the existence of a tempo that is neither slow nor fast but rather “moderate.” A moderate tempo is assumed to be that of a natural walking pace (76 to 80 paces per minute) or of a heartbeat (72 per minute). The tempo of a piece of music indicated by a composer is, however, neither absolute nor final. In performance it is likely to vary according to the performer’s interpretative ideas or to such considerations as the size and reverberation of the hall, the size of the ensemble, and, to a lesser extent, the sonority of the instruments. A change within such limits does not affect the rhythmic structure of a work.

Britannica Quiz

Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

Time

The mind apparently seeks some organizing principle in the perception of music, and if a grouping of sounds is not objectively present it imposes one of its own. Experiments show that the mind instinctively groups regular and identical sounds into twos and threes, stressing every second or third beat, and thus creates from an otherwise monotonous series a succession of strong and weak beats.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

In music such grouping is achieved by actual stress—i.e., by periodically making one note stronger than the others. When the stress occurs at regular intervals, the beats fall into natural time measures. Although in European music the concept of time measures reaches back to a remote age, only since the 15th century have they been indicated by means of bar lines. Thus, the terms measure and bar are often used interchangeably.

The time measure is indicated at the opening of a piece by a time signature—e.g., 2/4, 4/8, 3/4, 6/8. The length of each beat in a measure may be a time unit of short or long duration:

The signature 4/1 (above) means that the whole note (1) is the unit in each measure, and there are four (4) of them to each measure. In the second illustration, 4/2, the half note (2) is the unit of measurement, with four of them (4) to each measure, and so on.

The two basic types of time measure have either two or three beats and admit of many different notations.

“Four time,” or “common time,” is really a species of duple time allied to “two time,” as it can hardly be thought of without a subsidiary stress at the half measure—i.e., on the third beat—thus:

Duple, triple, and quadruple time measures—i.e., those in which there are two, three, and four beats to a measure—are known as simple time. The division of each of the component beats into three produces compound time:

More-complex times, such as the quintuple, 5/4, usually fall into groups of 3 + 2, as in “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets and in the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Rimsky-Korsakov, in Sadko, and Stravinsky, in Le Sacre du printemps, use 11 as a unit. Ravel’s piano trio opens with a signature of 8/8 with the internal organization 3 + 2 + 3. Folk song and folk dance, particularly from eastern Europe, influenced the use of asymmetrical time measures, as in the “Bulgarian Rhythm” pieces in 7/8 and 5/8 in Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.