Time signature tells us how many beats are in a bar and what we are measuring in. The most common form of time in music is 4/4, this time signature is seen in almost every pop song to ever exist. The meter 4/4 tells us that there are 4 beats in a bar and we are counting them beats in crotchets. 4/4 is the most simple time for us to understand as we are just counting to 4 and the bar is over. However there are more time signatures than just the one. 3/4 is a time signature that we see in waltz music. This is because we are counting 3 beats in a bar with crotchets as measurement. This means we are counting 1, 2 ,3, 1 ,2 3. This counting is also found in the dance of the waltz. In classical forms of music we can see that sometimes the time signature can change in the middle of the piece. Changing time signature can make your music way more interesting, this is because the more your music sticks to the time signature the listeners will pick up on it’s pattern of when each bar ends. If you change your time signature mid piece the listeners will become surprised about how the music has changed form, and the parts of the music they are expecting to be hearing 1 or 2 beats later comes sooner than they expected.
Changing time signature can create an immense amount of chaos in your music if it is change often. One composer than used this technique was Stravinsky in his composition ‘The Rite Of Spring’. This composition changes time so often that it creates total rhythmic chaos.
How to change time signature
Changing time signature can be done anywhere in your music with only a few ground rules. A new time change can only be done at the start of a bar, other wise this is just classed as a mistake in music. In musical notation the new time signature will always be played until told over wise, meaning if you want to go back to your previous time signature you must write that at the beginning of a bar in musical notation. You may want to change time signature for a multitude of reasons, this could be to: build suspense, surprise the listeners by coming in early or to create rhythmic chaos like Stravinsky in the rite of spring. I would analyse this piece of music but is very complex, and the information I would obtain from the analysis would not be very beneficial to my project. But analysing the music would be beneficial for projects around composition in general or film scoring, this is because the Rite Of Spring was very influential on film music.
Reading List
Bawiec, D., 2019. Time Signatures Explained, Part 5: Creating Interesting Motion with Meter Changes. [online] iZotope. Available at: <https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/time-signatures-explained-creating-interesting-motion-with-meter-changes.html> [Accessed 2 May 2021].