From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Duration is an amount of time or a particular time interval. In
sounds and music, a duration is a property of a tone that becomes one of the bases of
rhythm.
Sound and
music
A tone may be sustained for varying lengths of time. For
example, an event in the common sense has a duration greater than
zero (but not very long), but in certain specialized senses (such
as in the theory of
relativity), a duration of zero. It is often cited as one of
the fundamental aspects of music, see also rhythm.
Durations, and their beginnings and endings, may be described as
long, short, or taking a specific amount of time. Often duration is
described according to terms borrowed from descriptions of pitch. As such, the
duration complement is the amount of
different durations used, the duration scale is an
ordering (scale) of those
durations from shortest to longest, the duration range is the
difference in length between the shortest and longest, and the
duration hierarchy is an ordering of those
durations based on frequency of use (DeLone et al. (Eds.), 1975,
chap. 3).
Durational patterns are the foreground details
projected against a background metric structure,
which includes meter, tempo, and all rhythmic aspects which produce
temporal regularity or structure. Duration patterns may be divided
into rhythmic
units and rhythmic gestures (DeLone et al.
(Eds.), 1975, chap. 3). However, they may also be described using
terms borrowed from the metrical feet of
poetry: iamb (weak-strong), anapest
(weak-weak-strong), trochee
(strong-weak), dactyl (strong-weak-weak), and amphibrach
(weak-strong-weak), which may overlap to explain ambiguity (Cooper
and Meyer, 1960).
See also
References
- Cooper and Meyer (1960). The Rhythmic Structure of
Music. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-11522-4. Cited
in Delone directly below.
- DeLone et al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century
Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN
0-13-049346-5.
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