Meter (music)

“ So ask your printer supplier for noise figures if you think this will be a problem. Military standards say that for work needing heavy concentration—in areas like libraries and conference rooms—the sound level must be no more than 45 decibels on the dB (A) scale, which allows for sensitivity of the ear at various sound pitches. Otherwise, aim for a level less than 65 decibels. You may be able to rent the necessary meter from a scientific instrument store. Measure the sound from the distance someone’s head would be when he was working. ”

“ How did man reach the conception of fixed scales? Here again opinions differ. Some consider that the extreme notes were fixed by the average compass of the human voice in impassioned speech, the interval being variously divided. Others claim that along with the vocal phase of music there was an instrumental side, and that the mechanical conditions in connection with instruments had bearing in the matter of organizing sounds into a scale; the rude, primitive trumpet of wood or bark, still found among forest tribes in South America and Africa, gives a series of harmonic notes. ”

“ To make the different planes of action distinct, each has its own metre. These metres are the short octosyllabic couplet, the heroic decasyllable, the alliterative unrhymed verse of the body of the play, and, for the "Music," an exquisite invention of rhymed dactylics. The way in which they are interwoven is a masterpiece of metrical device. In the two scenes of the induction (to use the appropriate term of the Renaissance dramatists) the ground is laid of the whole metrical system of the poem; in the first scene by a single phrase of the Music ”

“ The Hindus divided their musical scale into several intervals smaller than our modern semitones. They adopted twenty-two intervals called s’ruti in the compass of an octave, which may therefore be compared to our chromatic intervals. As the frets of the vina are movable the performer can easily regulate them according to the scale, or mode, which he requires for his music. ”

“ I succeeded with difficulty in tuning my attention in again when the phono-lecturer came to the main theme of the evening—to our music as a mathematical composition (mathematics is the cause, music the effect) . The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. ”

“ An instrumental Theme, devoid of marked rhythmic character, is never really effective. Great Composers seem to have felt this, as if by instinct; hence, their Subjects are always reducible to metrical feet. All the Metres most common in Poetry, and innumerable others, have been used by them, over and over again: sometimes, in their strictest form; but, generally, with greater variety of treatment than that allowable in Verse, and with a more frequent employment of the various tetrasyllable feet, every one of which falls into its proper place in the economy of Instrumental Music. ”

“ Having two arms and two legs, men naturally moved with a symmetry that gradually impressed their minds; obliged by the facts of anatomy to group their motions in twos, they soon took the hint, and beat their drums or struck their cymbals accordingly. The primeval dance was doubtless the march. But soon they began to carry out the principle they had thus chanced upon, and despite anatomy devised the group of three. The existence of triple meter is all the proof needed that metrical form is essentially a process of intelligence, not a physical fatality ”

“ I know no other verse in which the effects of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes music.
The metre of the "Ancient Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad- metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published till 1816 ”

“ Performance scores show that these natural singers defy scales, but produce beautiful effects through their free and soaring pitch inflection. Stringed instruments have been hampered by accompaniment and by tradition and theory. We can anticipate significant developments outside of our diatonic scale which has come to be a sort of strait-jacket, at least theoretically. It has been shown, for example, that a quarter-tone instrument is not of much use unless music is written not only for these intervals but 68in modes, themes, and atmosphere adapted to such purpose. ”

“ The first attempts were toward the perfecting of a system of measuring music in time, and the outcome was the Perfect System, a thoroughly arbitrary and unnatural scheme of triple values. That the natural division of a musical note is into two halves scarcely needs an explanation. We therefore divide our whole notes into half notes, the halves into quarters, the quarters into eighths, and so forth. But the mensuralists divided the whole note into three parts or two unequal parts, and each of these into three more. ”

“ This sharping of the G augments the natural interval from F to G, and, since this augmented interval is hard to sing, the F, too, is sometimes sharped, and the scale then becomes what we call the melodic minor. Nothing could be more indicative than this ‘melodic’ compromise of the power harmony has exercised over the development of music, for rather than do without the leading tone, which is itself an alteration of the natural scale, we alter the scale still further. Our melodic minor scale is therefore constructed to square with the harmonic need, a queer paradox. ”

“ The pitch of a sound depends wholly upon the number of vibrations per second that produce it; and if one of two sounds consists of twice as many vibrations per second as the other one, they differ in pitch by the interval called in music an octave, this latter term merely signifying the number of intervals into which the larger interval [65] is divided for the ordinary musical scale. The difference between a high and a low sound is simply in the number of vibrations of the air reaching the ear in a given time. ”

“ Mr. Ellis has proposed to express difference of pitch in terms of the hundredth part of a tempered semitone; that is, the twelve-hundredth part of an octave. This unit, called by him the cent, we shall find it convenient to use in our discussion. The compass in cents of the intervals principally used in music, in their perfect form and as they are approximately given on tempered instruments, is as follows:
In the text we shall use the common symbolism of accented and unaccented letters for the sequence of notes on a keyed instrument. ”

“ Thus the interval C to E, = 4:5, is called a major third, and the interval E to G, = 5:6, is called a minor third; the interval C to G, = 2:3, is called a fifth, and that of C to C1, = 1:2, is called an octave. For the purposes of music it has been found necessary to introduce other notes between the seven notes of the octave. If a note is introduced which has a frequency greater than any one of the seven in the ratio of 25 to 24, that is called a sharpened note; thus the note of which the frequency is 3⁄2n × 25⁄24 would be called G sharp, and written G♯. ”

“ The metre, it has been stated, might strike the eye in the external aspect of the sentences; it was designed much more to charm the mind by the harmony and music of the thoughts. But while these general principles are still acknowledged, some further progress has been made in the examination of the structure of the verses, with the result that both more regularity of law and more variety of metre have been discovered. The elegy in particular is found to be shaped on special lines of its own. It has been pointed out that a peculiar metre is reserved for poems of mournful reflection. ”

“ From the standpoint of the eye, a measure is that portion of the staff found between two bars, (in certain cases this space may be less than a measure, as e.g., at the beginning and end of a movement) ; but from the standpoint of the ear a single, isolated measure is not possible, and the term must therefore be defined in the plural form.
Measures are similarly accented groups of evenly-spaced beats, each group having at least one accented and one non-accented beat. The strongest accent falls normally on the first beat in the measure. ”

“ No player upon a stringed instrument can play the scale of whole-tones and arrive at an octave which is in tune with the starting note, unless he deliberately changes one of the notes on the road and alters it while playing it. The obvious result of the application of the whole-tone scale to an orchestra or a string quartet would be to force them to adopt the equal temperament of the pianoforte, and play every interval except the octave out of tune. ”

“ All exercises and melodies, fingered for the accordeon, with 6 keys, may be played with equal facility on those with 8, 10, or 12 keys, if the key-note, which is the second key on each of the latter instruments, be considered as the first, omitting, in the calculation, the lowest key entirely. The learner should be very particular in learning the scale ; for if well acquainted with the manner of producing every note in the scale, any piece of music can be played, as notes in the same situation are always made the same way. ”

“ A musical string is of a uniform thickness, and is stretched between two points, by a force much greater than its weight. The stretching force which is applied is generally conceived as measured by the weight which would occasion an equal tension. The sound which a string gives, thus stretched, or in this mode of vibration, is called its fundamental sound. The tone of a string becomes more acute as we increase its tension, or diminish its length, and the weight of a given portion. ”

“ What is called the musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the original appointments of sound just as absolutely and definitely as the colors of the rainbow or prism in the optical properties and laws of light. And the visible objects of the world are not more certainly shaped and colored to us under the exact laws of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned, as objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibrations in the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that we hear the sea roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy ”

“ Again, the diatonic major scale is regarded by many musicians as the natural order of intervals on which the [Pg 231] compositions must be founded whenever the art of music has attained to a high degree of development, and which will therefore be universally adopted in the course of time. They form this opinion especially from the laws of Acoustics, since the intervals constituting the diatonic major scale are those which as harmonics stand in the most simple relation to the fundamental tone produced by a vibrating body. ”

“ Like other animals he calculates, forecasts and provides, but he alone possesses the measuring faculty. Rambling again and again through the region of the past, the thought presses forward for recognition that man is a measuring animal, and hence his ability to produce instruments of music. In the beginning they were all founded upon measure, the rude measure of what suited the fingers ”

“ The taste for measured, rhythmical musical sounds is, as we have seen, both primitive and universal. From this very taste has sprung the invention of meter, or the art of closely marrying the words to the melody, and consequently of counting the words and even the syllables of the words when they have more than one, of regarding their accentuation in chanted poetry, the only form that originally existed. In the primitive choirs the air was the most important element ”

“ Thus "hexameter" means a line of six single feet, of which, though the first four may vary, the fifth must normally be a dactyl and the sixth a spondee; "pentameter," a line of five feet, dactyls or spondees, but rigidly distributed in two halves of two and a half feet each. Of late years, in modern English prosody-writing, though fortunately not universally, a most objectionable habit has grown up of calling the heroic line a "pentameter," the octosyllabic iambic a "tetrameter." ”

“ It must, however, be remembered that a song or piece played on an instrument is a live thing and does not submit to mathematical precision. There is, it is true, only one form for each scale, and every singer and musician tries to get it right, though no one invariably manages to do so. ”

“ This is indicated by the light moving to the end of the second division on the scale; the meter vibrates twice as fast. Now the current is three times as strong, now four times, and so on. You will observe that the position of the spot of light and the rate of vibration always correspond. Every vibration of the meter corresponds to a definite quantity of electricity, and causes a hand on a dial to move on one step. By looking at the dial, we can see how many vibrations there have been and therefore how much electricity has passed. ”

“ There are two obvious relations in which the scales employed in any system of music may stand to each other. They may be related as two keys of the same mode in modern music: that is to say, we may have to do with a scale consisting of a fixed succession of intervals, which may vary in pitch—may be 'transposed,' as we say, from one pitch or key to another. Or the scales may differ as the Major mode differs from the Minor, namely in the order in which the intervals follow each other. ”