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I have a very difficult time understanding the relevance of time signature in music. Does a musician think in terms of time signature when composing a piece, or thinks in terms of melody?

When I play say a complex piece of music in my head I always go with melody, whether it's 3/4 or 4/4 never have a significance because I don't really hear that if I'm not composing for percussions. I guess it's the same for a composer too, he has a melody in his mind and tries to structure that into music. I understand that if a percussion accompanies that piece it needs to find the repetitive beat(and thus time signature is relevant here) but that's not always the case, for example if piece is for a piano only, or the melody is not repetitive.

We don't remember a piece of music by its time signature, we remember it by its melody. So is time signature something later added on paper to make the math right, or does it really have a musical significance?

doubleE
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    Note that melody cannot exist without rhythm and timing information, so you can't think in terms of melody or meter/rhythm (which is what time signature is there to communicate). – Todd Wilcox Dec 24 '22 at 04:59
  • @ToddWilcox why it can't? If one remembers a melody correctly that's enough for him to play it. If he knows the melody, how does time signature affects how he plays it? – doubleE Dec 24 '22 at 09:05
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    Sheet music is very often for situations where the musician does not know or remember the melody. If you know or remember the melody, then one of the things you know is the meter. If you already know the melody, you don’t need sheet music at all. For composers, they need a way to write down the rhythm of the melody and a time signature is part of doing that. There isn’t right now a better system of writing rhythm and meter that doesn’t have time signatures. – Todd Wilcox Dec 24 '22 at 09:33
  • On the other hand, time signatures are not a great way to write down music that has strong rhythm but not a steady pulse. We just don't have anything better available. – ojs Dec 24 '22 at 20:00

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Even if you do not actively analyze the time signature of a piece it is still an intrinsical element of the melody. Let’s say you take the motif from Beethoven’s Eroica. You do not need to know the piece is in 3/4, the duct of the melody itself strongly implies 3/4. If you were to try to put this into a 4/4 for example you’d either get a highly syncopated feel or you’d need to match the durations to the different meter, such as this:

http://petzel.at/Beethoven-Eroica.mp3

enter image description here

No matter what you do, the duct and thus the quality of the melody changes.

Edit:

In fact, what makes some really popular melodies especially memorable are often not so much the actual notes, but the rhythm and the shape. Consider this example, you easily recognize the melody (if you know it):

enter image description here

Lazy
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It's all about rhythm. That's especially important for dance music; if there's no rhythm to the music, the dancers don't know when to move. But it also matters for most other musical styles. Simply hitting a sequence of notes in the right order is likely to sound very dull.

Once you have decided what the rhythm is, you can group the notes within bar lines to indicate where the "phrases" are. If your rhythm is consistent throughout the piece, you will then find that a single time signature describes how many beats there are in each bar.

Simon B
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There are many tunes that lend themselves to being played in different time signatures. One such is Fly Me to the Moon - actually written in 3/4, nearly always played in 4/4. The tune is still quite recognisable in either, so your supposition doesn't necessarily ring true.

It's my belief that a composer has a particular melody in mind, and that's it. But in order to communicate it to another player, on paper, for example, it needs writing down, and that's when it becomes apparent what its time signature is.

The time signature is an important part of any piece, as it compartmentalises the tune into small segments, which are easy to follow, in a regular beat. Also easier to write, easier to read. In a larger ensemble situation, it's also very useful. Bars can be numbered, so everyone knows where they are, which would be very difficult given no time signature.

Just about every piece will have its own intrinsic rhythm, which to an extent will dictate what that time sig. will have to be. And it seems it's something Humans are happy with - being able to tap one's foot, or even dance along to something. Without a time sig. and its subsequent rhythmic pattern that wouldn't be possible.

Tim
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  • Care to validate the dv? Season's greetings. – Tim Dec 24 '22 at 16:00
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    @Hm, cannot speak about the dv, but I do not think that most composers a particular melody in mind, and that's it. Compositions usually is much more involved than just writing down a melody. With modern composition we often loose the concept of a strict metrum. But for older composers the time sig was necessarily one of the first things you think about when writing a piece, because the time signature is essential for the character of the whole piece. – Lazy Dec 24 '22 at 17:18
  • @Lazy - thanks. Once a time sig. in a piece has been established, it's probably not given much thought until the writing stage. Certainly not from my writing experience. – Tim Dec 24 '22 at 17:47
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    I think we need to differentiate between waltz/swing transformations, where the BIG metrical features are retained -whichever way you play 'fly me..', the barlines come before 'Fly', 'moon', 'play' etc. - and the complete re-structuring of the same row of notes in @Lazy's Beethoven example above. The first is commonplace, the second vanishingly rare. – Laurence Dec 24 '22 at 17:50
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    @Laurence - I think whenever a tune is changed from 3/4>4/4 or vice versa, the bar lines will basically remain where they were originally. No change there. Otherwise the basic melody does change drastically. – Tim Dec 24 '22 at 18:15
  • I understand what you say, it makes sense. What I don't understand is that when I play a piece in my head I never clap to it. It's unintuitive to me to "try to clap" to a piece, because the feeling of that piece is in its melody and melody has its own flow, hard to contain the whole song in 1 basic rhythm. If I clap, I'm emphasizing something that's not the inherent feeling of that piece. I understand we need to break it down to manage it for communication, but that's simply a notation to me not the musical substance – doubleE Dec 24 '22 at 19:21