music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, duration is an amount of

time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

or how long or short a note,

phrase In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...

, section, or composition lasts. "''Duration'' is the length of time a pitch, or tone, is sounded." A note may last less than a second, while a symphony may last more than an hour. One of the fundamental features of

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular r ...

, or encompassing rhythm, duration is also central to

meter The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...

and musical form.

Release Release may refer to: * Art release, the public distribution of an artistic production, such as a film, album, or song * Legal release, a legal instrument * News release, a communication directed at the news media * Release (ISUP), a code to i ...

plays an important part in determining the

timbre In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...

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. 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, 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. Durational patterns are the foreground details projected against a background metric structure, which includes

tempo In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for 'time'; plural 'tempos', or from the Italian plural), measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given musical composition, composition, and is often also an indication of the composition ...

, 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 In poetic metre, a trochee ( ) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, unstressed one, in qualitative meter, as found in English, and in modern linguistics; or in quantitative meter, as found in ...

(strong–weak), dactyl (strong–weak–weak), and amphibrach (weak–strong–weak), which may overlap to explain ambiguity.Cooper and Meyer (1960). ''The Rhythmal Structure of Music'', . University of Chicago Press. . Cited in Winold (1975, chapter three).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Duration (Music) Elements of music Rhythm and meter

See also

References