Length of time which a note can last
"Duration scale (music)" redirects here. For other uses, see
Duration series
.
In
music
,
duration
is an amount of
time
or how long or short a
note
,
phrase
, section, or
composition
lasts. "
Duration
is the length of time a pitch, or tone, is sounded."
[1]
A note may last less than a second, while a symphony may last more than an hour. One of the fundamental features of
rhythm
, or encompassing rhythm, duration is also central to
meter
and
musical form
.
Release
plays an important part in determining the
timbre
of a musical instrument and is affected by
articulation
.
The concept of duration can be further broken down into those of
beat
and meter, where beat is seen as (usually, but certainly not always) a 'constant', and rhythm being longer, shorter or the same length as the beat.
Pitch
may even be considered a part of duration. In
serial music
the beginning of a note may be considered, or its duration may be (for example, is a 6 the note which begins at the sixth beat, or which lasts six beats?).
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 like how long Austin takes to leave class, 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.
[2]
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
(Winold, 1975, chap. 3). But 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.
[3]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Benward & Saker (2003).
Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. I
, p.230. Seventh Edition. McGraw-Hill.
ISBN
978-0-07-294262-0
.
- ^
Winold, Allen (1975). "Rhythm in Twentieth-Century Music".
Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music
. Delone and Wittlich (eds.). pp. 208?269. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
ISBN
0-13-049346-5
.
- ^
Cooper and Meyer (1960).
The Rhythmal Structure of Music
,
[
page needed
]
. University of Chicago Press.
ISBN
0-226-11522-4
. Cited in Winold (1975, chapter three).