(Source: I am a professional drummer)
While some inexperienced composers/arrangers/scorers may transcribe 3/4 pieces in 6/8 to make the score look better, it is a fundamentally incorrect thing to do.
3/4 has one significant beat per bar: ONE two three | ONE two three
- Think any waltz you've ever heard.
6/8 has two siginficant beats per bar: ONE two three Four five six | ONE to three Four five six
- Think Follow the Yellow Brick Road from the Wizard of Oz, or We Are the Champions by Queen.
The second down beat has less significance than the first. In this way 6/8 is like 2/4, except in triple form, not duple form. Pieces in 6/8 do not (and generally should not) feel the same as pieces written in 3/4.
The only thing 3/4 and 6/8 share is the number of note-lengths that fit into a bar, which has no bearing on the feel, sound or rhythm of a piece.
Sources: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/15 , https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/36fn1g/i_still... , and own experience
The easiest way that happens is lcm(2,3).
I assume you meant to write 'compound meter', in which case yes, absolutely.
> If you see 6/8, it does not imply there are 2 significant beats
It should. If it does not, then you'll be notating a lot of accented notes explicitly in the music to convey to the player exactly what beat formation is.
If these accents are regular, this is a waste/clutter of notation because it's clear you're actually writing a piece in a time other than 6/8. If the accents are irregular, then they are likely either indicating syncopation, or they are completely irregular in which case you're deliberately writing music with a feel that cannot be accurately described by a single time signature, and you should be changing time signatures through the piece as necessary to describe the beat to the player. (Or it cannot be nicely described by the notation in use).
Jacob Collier is an example of a musician who enjoys exploring this kind of music. See for example: https://youtu.be/b78NoobJNEo?t=14m40s onwards. He invented a new terminology for time signatures to accommodate his style of writing.
This phrase also has two significant beats. There's just a barline in the middle. See my point?
I would argue that We Are The Champions is actually a 12/8 groove (conceptually triplets in 4/4). And we would both be right!
The convention is that these two time signatures stand-in for two different actual perceptually different music feelings.
The "tactus" (the place we feel the beat) certainly can be subjectively moved to different levels in the hierarchy. Furthermore, you're right that the bottom number is basically just a notation preference (6/8 and 6/16 are effectively identical, though nobody uses the latter).
But the whole point of anyone describing the difference between 6/8 and 3/4 is that they are using the convention to describe the actual feel difference between dividing the same amount of time into 2 vs 3, the hemiola issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiola
I basically was taking issue with seeing a reply to a post that was highlighting this difference that is a real perceptual one (not just a notational one, but described, unfortunately, with focus on notation) with the claim "there is no difference".
I apologize for the aspects of my reply that were ad hominem instead of just critiquing the post itself.
It is impossible to quantify or intellectually stratify feelings and perceptions. All I have to say is "I feel it differently" and now your stratification is incomplete. But you can say without a doubt that 3÷4 === 6÷8.
Of course I am aware of the conventional approach to playing 6/8 that results in this perception that beats 1 and 4 are not of exactly equal weight, and of all the different ways you can play two against three, three against four and so on. Polyrhythm doesn't stop at hemiola by the way. Are you also feeling five against three, seven against five, etc.?
I can show you examples of music in 6 where you may be unable to find the downbeat at all. So you can't say for certain how I or anybody else is going to hear it in every case. These prejudicial approaches to music cause closed ears.
The whole point is that when we communicate, we use (often mediocre) conventions.
3/4 and 6/8 are notational things with nothing but convention determining their meaning. But same with the entire notation system, it's just shapes with no meaning until we assign meaning to it.
The only really valid theory of music is one that embraces the subjective psychology of it (music cognition etc).
To say that music where one can't find the beat is "in 6" is already weird. It's only "in 6" if there's something about a 6-beat meter in the mind of some person, listener or performer. We can listen to something together and you can experience it in 6 while I experience it in 7, if we're capable of those different subjective interpretations (and the sound content will affect whether that's easier or harder).
The whole point is that while the prejudicial approaches to music are wrong (music is 100% subjective), the purpose of the original article (by my charitable interpretation) is to describe two different subjective experiences that are possible, hemiola being about the most basic introduction to such concepts for beginners.
So, I took your original "no difference" comment to be a denial of the existence of two distinct subjective experiences just because the notation can be seen (ignoring convention) to have no indication of the difference.
You can see how I could take your post that way. I think it's really valuable for anyone learning about music to understand these subjective experiences and their differences. We agree that it's crappy to assert that these subjective experiences are in the notation, but I was willing to see "6/8 vs 3/4" as a communication stand-in for the subjective difference that is real.
Surely, some people say "6/8 vs 3/4" and mean to assert some difference that is just not really there. And others use it to refer to the hemiola distinction of subjectively parsing an accent in these two ways. The former is a delusion, the latter is a valid insight.
P.S. In case you haven't seen it, one of the neatest rhythm things out there is http://bouncemetronome.com/ — it goes intro demostrating beautifully any level of polyrhythms, including offset ones evolving ones, rhythms that phase over time because of differently changing tempos, and a ludicriously long list of other things… a fun crazy tool to get anyone into stuff way beyond whatever conventional music system they may have learned otherwise. I doubt much of it would be entirely novel to you, but you may still appreciate it. The options are enormous, hard to find the limits.
If your phrases really go ONE two three FOUR five six then notate your piece as 3/8. 6/8 is for ONE two three Four five six SEVEN eight nine Ten eleven twelve, where beat four is significant, but not as significant as beat one.
Of course you do have patterns of bar phrases, not all first-beats-of-the-bar are equal in a larger piece, and where you draw the line between a bar and a phrase is ultimately a matter of taste and judgement. But a player will absolutely understand 6/8 and 3/4 differently; a run of quavers in 6/8 is ONE two three Four five six, a run of quavers in 3/4 is ONE two Three four Five six.
Of course you can take 3/4 music that happens to use a lot of two-bar structures and play it with the same feel as the same thing notated as 6/8.
But the point of comparing the two is not to highlight that case where the same music could be written either way. The point is to describe how if you take the same 6 8th-notes and give them a 3×2 feel, it's musically different from a 2×3 feel.
Of course, this only works well if you have multiple players per part. This ain't really practical outside of marching or symphonic/orchestral contexts.
Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then you are experiencing rhythm. taDA and TAda are different rhythms even if the timing is the same and the sounds even are the same but you treat them as having those accent patterns (either at-will or through other things that draw your attention such as a their timing in relation to a meter that has gotten set in your mind or even visual cues as to which should be accented).
The 3/4 vs 6/8 distinction is a historic convention, not something in the math. By convention, 6/8 is divided into 2 sets of 3. And yes, these get fuzzy in various real-world concepts like the whole idea of hemiola which is the overlaying of these two meters.
and
(1) 2 3 (4) 5 6
are rhythmically identical. You're only conceptualizing them differently.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to write this myopic and extremely condescending explanation of my area of study. I will be sure to return the favor someday.
Same reason why we treat 2/4 and 4/4 differently.
Your decision to give certain beats more or less emphasis is a subjective one. You can glean absolutely no information about a piece from the way the rhythm is subdivided, except maybe the intended tempo.
So, for example, lots of pop/rock music gets notated rather arbitrarily in practice because it's mostly about the feel from recordings anyway. It's common in that world to see what classical convention would call incorrect notation. And since the core notes all work still and you can go by the feel from the sound you know, it doesn't really matter.
But the classical conventions include ideas that the subjective accents you describe are in fact implied by certain time-signatures.
Similar deal with 3/4 v. 6/8. In 3/4, you have 3 beats per measure, subdivided into halves (duplets). In 6/8, you have 2 beats per measure, subdivided into thirds (triplets).
The point was to compare (1) & (2) & (3) & to the different accent pattern of (1) 2 3 (4) 5 6.
Anyway, even in the case where you are instead counting the 8ths of 6/8 with the same timing as the quarters of 3/4, the 3/4 more readily allows the possibility of odd-numbers of measures in phrases.
That's like how 2/4 and 4/4 are truly identical if the notes are the same (the same son in either time signature is unchanged), but only in 2/4 can you readily have 5-measure sections (i.e. 10 quarter notes) as phrases.
Anyway, there's obviously some miscommunication between us. I assume you actually would agree with everything I'm saying if we were discussing in person. But your original post here will read to many people here as making the claim that there's no distinction between:
3/4 A E C E C E (all 8ths)
and
6/8 A E C E C E (all 8ths)
whereas the whole point of the original article was to describe that these identical timings have different feel because of the different accent structure.
Well, I did say I was a drummer!
I was replying to:
> There is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8
Which is simply wrong. There's no difference in the number of 8th notes. And the same music can be written and felt when written as two bars of 3/4 with quarter notes versus one half-speed bar of 6/8. But that's a much more qualified point.
There is a distinction, and it's not in the notation itself but in what the notation means.
To say there's no difference is like saying present tense and past tense of "read" has no difference in pronunciation. Of course, the plain letters fail to capture the difference, and the difference can be confused at times, and is just a matter of convention. In the case of 3/4 and 6/8, they have a different accent structure, and thus a different musical feeling by convention, and discussing that difference was the only point of the article that this comment was relating to.
Huh, maybe you are violently agreeing with @nerflad? I read the parent comment to mean that convention is the only thing that matters.
> You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it.
Why the snark and personal attack? You have no idea what @nerflad understands intellectually. I’m always surprised when someone with your level of HN karma hasn’t learned to avoid insults and condescension in comments like yours. Are you threatened by the idea that there’s more that one right way to write a tempo?
> Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another.
I think that definition of rhythm is very bad. Rhythm can exist without a human perceiving it. Google dictionary’s definition sounds better: “a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound”. So does Wikipedia’s: “Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") 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 (as with the riff in a rock music song); to several minutes or hours, or, at the most extreme, even over many years.”
So, in summary, the meaning of the word pretty much is mere timing. Your treatise on perceptual psychology is talking about something else.
> The 3/4 vs 6/8 distinction is a historic convention, not something in the math.
Isn’t that exactly what @nerflad was saying??
Anyway, the post I was replying to didn't say that the difference is due to convention, it asserted the difference didn't exist.
And I stand by my points about rhythm (which I think @nerflad would agree with in the end incidentally).
The "strong and weak" part from Wikipedia only exists in music in the mind of a person. It's not musically strong or weak based on physics of sound waves. Whether something is loud or quiet can be relevant to describing rhythm generically, but music is 100% subjective.
Human beings predictably experience certain musical things in certain ways, especially those from the same music cultures. But a full 100% of everything in music is only music when there are listeners (or just imaginers) having a subjective experience. Otherwise, there is no music. Pressure waves in air or dots on paper are not music.
I don't care what Google's dictionary says. Describing a trite, pithy one-sentence thing for a complex concept is necessarily going to be simplistic.