Rhythm: music symbols explained

23 symbols and terms, each explained in a sentence or two — the same dictionary the free Artform score reader uses when you tap a marking on a real score.

Beat

The pulse you tap your foot to. Everything in the bar is measured against it, and it keeps going whether or not a note happens to land on it.

Pulse

The steady throb underneath the music. A beat is one of them; the pulse is the fact that they keep coming.

Metre

How the beats are grouped: in twos, threes or fours. The time signature is metre written down.

Simple time

Each beat divides into TWO. Four-four, three-four and two-four are all simple: one, and, two, and.

Compound time

Each beat divides into THREE. Six-eight is two beats of three, which is why it lilts where three-four walks.

Syncopation

Putting the accent where the beat is not. The music pulls against its own pulse, and that tug is most of what makes a groove.

Swing

Playing pairs of quavers long-short instead of even. Written straight and played crooked, by agreement.

Hemiola

Three beats behaving as two, or two as three, without the time signature changing. Common at the end of a Baroque phrase, and in Bernstein.

Duplet

Two notes in the time of three. The compound-time mirror of a triplet.

Tuplet

Any borrowed grouping: three in the time of two, five in the time of four. The bracket and its number say which.

Polyrhythm

Two different groupings sounding at once, most often three against two. Each hand is right and they disagree.

Ostinato

A short pattern repeated without let-up. Not a riff you develop, one you sit on: the ground the rest is built over.

Downbeat

The first beat of the bar, and the strongest. What a conductor's hand comes down on.

Upbeat

The beat before the downbeat, where a phrase often starts. Also the arm coming up to prepare it.

Cross-rhythm

Two groupings pulling against each other inside the same bar, most commonly three against two.

Augmentation

The same theme in longer notes: twice the value, half the speed, twice the weight.

Diminution

The same theme in shorter notes. Bach uses both as a way of arguing with himself.

Anacrusis

The upbeat: notes before the first full bar, so the phrase starts before the beat does.

Backbeat

The accent moved onto beats two and four. The engine of almost all popular music, and completely foreign to a classical phrase.

Groove

The particular way a rhythm sits: slightly ahead, slightly behind, or dead on. Not written, and impossible to miss.

Additive rhythm

Bars built by adding uneven groups: three plus three plus two. Bulgarian dance and a great deal of Bartók.

Isorhythm

A repeating rhythmic pattern laid over a different-length melodic pattern, so the two only realign after a long while.

Agogic accent

An accent made by LENGTH rather than volume: dwelling on a note marks it out as surely as hitting it does.

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