A tatum is a feature of music that has been variously defined as: "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase", [1] "the shortest durational value [...] in music that [is] still more than incidentally encountered", [2] "the smallest cognitively meaningful subdivision of the main beat", [3] and "the fastest pulse present in a piece of music". [4] "In Western notation, tatums may correspond typically to sixteenth- or twenty-fourth-notes", [3] or thirty-second notes. [4]
More technically, a tatum is the "lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events: a time quantum. It is roughly equivalent to the time division that most highly coincides with note onsets". [5] The tatum allows a musician's deviation from an ensemble's tempo (which may be implied or explicitly played) to be quantified: mathematically, "a deviation function determines the amount of time that an event metrically falling on a particular tatum should be shifted when performed". [1]
The existence of the tatum allowed human perception of music to be more closely modelled by algorithms. [6] This was important in the development of software for Echo Nest, which underlies several music streaming services. [6]
The term was coined by Jeff Bilmes in an MIT Master's thesis, Timing Is of the Essence, published in 1993, and is named after the influential jazz pianist Art Tatum, "whose tatum was faster than all others". [1] [7]
Rhythm generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time can apply to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to several seconds ; to several minutes or hours, or, at the most extreme, even over many years.
In music, syncopation involves a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm": a "placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn't normally occur". It is the correlation of at least two sets of time intervals.
A metronome, from ancient Greek μέτρον and νέμω, is a device that produces an audible click or other sound at a regular interval that can be set by the user, typically in beats per minute (BPM). Musicians use the device to practice playing to a regular pulse. Metronomes typically include synchronized visual motion.
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another, or as simple manifestations of the same meter. The rhythmic layers may be the basis of an entire piece of music (cross-rhythm), or a momentary section. Polyrhythms can be distinguished from irrational rhythms, which can occur within the context of a single part; polyrhythms require at least two rhythms to be played concurrently, one of which is typically an irrational rhythm. Concurrently in this context means within the same rhythmic cycle. The underlying pulse, whether explicit or implicit can be considered one of the concurrent rhythms. For example, the son clave is poly-rhythmic because its 3 section suggests a different meter from the pulse of the entire pattern.
Arthur Tatum Jr. was an American jazz pianist.
Harlem stride piano, stride piano, commonly abbreviated to stride, is a jazz piano style that was developed in the large cities of the East Coast of the United States, mainly New York City, during the 1920s and 1930s. The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin and of much early jazz, stride players' left hands often leapt greater distances on the keyboard, and they played in a wider range of tempos and with a greater emphasis on improvisation. The term "stride" comes from the idea of the pianist's left hand leaping, or "striding", across the piano.
The clave is a rhythmic pattern used as a tool for temporal organization in Afro-Cuban music. It is present in a variety of genres such as Abakuá music, rumba, conga, son, mambo, salsa, songo, timba and Afro-Cuban jazz. The five-stroke clave pattern represents the structural core of many Afro-Cuban rhythms.
In music, groove is the sense of an effect ("feel") of changing pattern in a propulsive rhythm or sense of "swing". In jazz, it can be felt as a quality of persistently repeated rhythmic units, created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section. Groove is a significant feature of popular music, and can be found in many genres, including salsa, funk, rock, fusion, and soul.
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse, of the mensural level. The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a piece of music, or the numbers a musician counts while performing, though in practice this may be technically incorrect. In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts, including pulse, tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.
In the history of European art music, the common practice period is the era of the tonal system. Though it has no exact dates, most features of the common-practice period persisted from the mid- to late baroque period, through the Classical, Romantic and Impressionist periods, from around 1650 to 1900. The period saw considerable stylistic evolution, with some patterns and conventions flourishing and then declining, for example the sonata form. Thus, the dates 1650–1900 are necessarily nebulous and arbitrary borders that depend on context. The most important unifying feature throughout the period is a harmonic language to which modern music theorists can apply Roman numeral chord analysis.
In music, a motif(pronunciation) (help·info) is a short musical phrase, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition: "The motive is the smallest structural unit possessing thematic identity".
In music and music theory, the pulse consists of beats in a (repeating) of identical yet distinct periodic short-duration stimuli perceived as points in time occurring at the mensural level. "This pulse is typically what listeners entrain to as they tap their foot or dance along with a piece of music, and is also colloquially termed the 'beat,' or more technically the 'tactus' ." "Even a person untrained in music, can generally sense the pulse and may respond by tapping a foot or clapping."
Timing in music refers to the ability to "keep time" accurately and to synchronise to an ensemble, as well as to expressive timing—subtle adjustment of note or beat duration, or of tempo, for aesthetic effect.
Jazz drumming is the art of playing percussion in jazz styles ranging from 1910s-style Dixieland jazz to 1970s-era jazz fusion and 1980s-era Latin jazz. The techniques and instrumentation of this type of performance have evolved over several periods, influenced by jazz at large and the individual drummers within it. Stylistically, this aspect of performance was shaped by its starting place, New Orleans, as well as numerous other regions of the world, including other parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
In music, the term swing has two main uses. Colloquially, it is used to describe the quality or impression or effect ("feel") of a changing pattern in a propulsive rhythm created by the musical interaction between the performers, especially when the music prompts a visceral response such as foot-tapping or head-nodding, which sense is called "groove". The term, and swung note(s) and swung rhythm, is also used more specifically, to refer to a technique that involves alternately lengthening and shortening the first and second consecutive notes in the two part pulse-divisions in a beat.
A bell pattern is a rhythmic pattern of striking a hand-held bell or other instrument of the idiophone family, to make it emit a sound at desired intervals. It is often a key pattern, in most cases it is a metal bell, such as an agogô, gankoqui, or cowbell, or a hollowed piece of wood, or wooden claves. In band music, bell patterns are also played on the metal shell of the timbales, and drum kit cymbals.
In music, a cross-beat or cross-rhythm is a specific form of polyrhythm. The term cross rhythm was introduced in 1934 by the musicologist Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980). It refers to when the rhythmic conflict found in polyrhythms is the basis of an entire musical piece.
Sub-Saharan African music is characterised by a "strong rhythmic interest" that exhibits common characteristics in all regions of this vast territory, so that Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980) has described the many local approaches as constituting one main system. C. K. Ladzekpo also affirms the profound homogeneity of approach. West African rhythmic techniques carried over the Atlantic were fundamental ingredients in various musical styles of the Americas: samba, forró, maracatu and coco in Brazil, Afro-Cuban music and Afro-American musical genres such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, funk, soul, reggae, hip hop, and rock and roll were thereby of immense importance in 20th century popular music. The drum is renowned throughout Africa.
In computer science, the Brodal queue is a heap/priority queue structure with very low worst case time bounds: for insertion, find-minimum, meld and decrease-key and for delete-minimum and general deletion. They are the first heap variant to achieve these bounds without resorting to amortization of operational costs. Brodal queues are named after their inventor Gerth Stølting Brodal.
Tresillo is a rhythmic pattern used in Latin American music. It is a more basic form of the rhythmic figure known as the habanera.
