There just seemed a point (reasonably early on, I'm afraid) where discussion ended and argument took over, where there was not so much a legitimate interest in exploring the concepts than an attempt to 'win', and I find that rather off-putting.

Anyhow, I should be working.  I have travel preparation to attend to ...

Well, for some reason my work doesn't tend to involve frequent or massive changes of tempo, so who knows.  In a recent string quartet, though, I had tempos sliding around all over the place, independently in various subgroups of the ensemble, so that I had to make some attempt at "clock time"-based proportionality for the score to have any bearing whatever on the actual sounding result. (For various other reasons involving physical parameters of bowing and whatnot it's highly approximate anyway, after a point, but that didn't seem like a good enough reason to throw my hands up entirely.)  Since there are constant accels. and rits., however, that wound up involving quadratic equations and all sorts of other nastiness.  I've always just used a constant quaver=xx mm system (before and) since, although what that "xx" is varies from piece to piece, and from movement to movement within multi-movement pieces, based on the density of the notational context.

qt: It seems pretty clear to me that what G.G. is getting at is that traditional rhythmic notation is precise regardless of how it's laid out; that all of the relevant proportional relationships are encoded in the symbology whether two demihemisemiparaquasiquavers are two millimeters or six inches apart from each other.  "Precision" is not the issue, and in that I agree with him; the issue is interparametric consistency of visual presentation.  But one alternative is not less precise than the other.

PS. When did I get four stars??! oh god, how embarrassing.

It means we are indulging in a pastiche of Member Grew, surely?    Seriously, what are the supposed rules concerning using bold posts, and should we necessarily be bound simply by net customs (bearing in mind how questionable all sorts of net practices are )?

Aha. I was using bold for the common reason of distinguishing between one text part and another; I could have used inverted commas too, to highlight the dictionary part as opposed to my own words. I stand informed. Still, some people really are too precious.

Can I just check something, please?

Irrational time sigs are things like 5/3 or 17/5.  i.e. Where the bottom number is not a power of 2.

So, normal sigs have divisors like 2, 4, 8, etc representing minim, crotchet, quaver etc.

So a divisor of 3 would represent beats made up of dotted crotchets?  And a divisor of 6 would represent a beat as long as a dotted quaver?

So, divided by 5 means the beats are double dotted quavers? And divided by 7 means the beats are quavers tied to demisemis?

If that is all right, then do we still use the term irrational for time sigs that involve actual irrational numbers, like pi, or the square root of 2?

And in these cases, I guess we should sher that spatial notation may well be helpful, but wouldn't be precise.



Please help a confused Tommo

Tommo

Thanks Ian!

Divide by 3 means beats are a third of a breve makes a whole load more sense.

Tommo