frequency and tempo

Soundings

I gave a talk at the apartment of Nisha Nadan (and flatmates) as part of Fredtalks… the talk was entitled Advanced Metronome Techniques, and it branched off into a general discussion about the nature of perception.
I showed how you can use a metronome to cultivate the ability to view a rhythm from different perspectives. Like a piece of sculpture, a rhythm will take on a completely different shape and feeling depending from which perspective it is heard. I stumbled across this quite by accident. Perhaps you have had this experience too? Turning on a radio, I happened across a song midway through, and my mind placed the gravity (or the 'one', as muso's like to call it) of the music in a different spot from where it was intended, the result being a wonderfully weird sounding piece of music. Alas this state didn't last, as the many pointers and cues in the music muscled this fresh perspective to where it was intended, and the piece morphed before my ears back to a run of the mill pop song.
I have had similar experiences with harmony, hearing a song from a different tonal centre to the one that was intended with similarly delightful results.
But back to the talk on rhythm… it stemmed as well from some renewed investigations of the correspondences between an exercise called the Rhythm Pyramid and the ratios of the intervals found in the harmonic series.

If quarter notes = C1, then 8th notes = C2, 8th notes triplets = G2, 16th notes = C3, quintuplets (a 5 note subdivision) = E3, 16th note triplets = G3, and 32nd notes = C4.

frequency = tempo and melody = rhythm (from a certain perspective anyway).