Feeling Time

Melody: Part 14

Let’s try to recognise chunks of time, just by listening.

We’ve visually decoded the rhythm of The Melody, and learnt a lot about rhythm along the way, but we haven’t yet tried decoding rhythms by ear.

It’s time to try our hand at the real thing, through 10 challenges spread across 3 levels of difficulty.

If you’re fuzzy about any aspect of our rhythmic journey so far, now would be a great time to do a quick review, beginning with Part 9 and going all the way upto Part 13.

All the best!

What to Expect

We’re going to keep things simple by using only 3 sub-rhythms — or phrases — in various combinations. Each challenge (in any level) is basically some combination of these 3 phrases.

These phrases are:

• Phrase 1: Ta,

• Phrase 2: TaKa, and

• Phrase 3: TaMi.

In Level I, these 3 phrases will each have a unique sound. This way, it’ll be easy to recognise them.

In Level II, the phrases will sound more alike, without sounding identical. You’ll need to pay more attention to the timing of the inner beats in this level.

In Level III, sound differences will vanish and the only way to recognise each phrase will be based on the timing of the inner beats.

In every rhythm challenge, tempo-beats — essentially, Ta — will be explicitly part of the rhythm.

The Phrases

To give you some frame of reference, here are the 3 phrases visualised:

The 3 Phrases

This is the sound of Ta (Phrase 1):

Here’s TaKa (Phrase 2), with Ka right after Ta (an observation that will be useful in levels II and III):

Notice how the Ta in TaKa (Phrase 2) sounds different from the lone Ta (Phrase 1) above. This is to make it easier to identify phrases in Level I.

In the Level I version of TaKa, Ta and Ka sound identical, while being different from the lone Ta (Phrase 1).

Here’s TaMi (Phrase 3), with Mi further away from Ta compared to the Ka in Phrase 2 above:

Here too, in Phrase 3, Ta and Mi are the same sound (for now).

As an example, here’s a rhythm with 4 repetitions of TaKa:

We would decode it as TaKa TaKa TaKa TaKa. Simple!

Level I

Try decoding the following rhythms.

1. 1 phrase, repeated:

2. 1 phrase, repeated:

3. 2 phrases in combination:

4. All 3 phrases in combination:

Level II

Good job with Level I! Let’s kick it up a notch.

Ta will remain the same, but TaKa and TaMi will sound slightly different.

Here’s TaKa:

Here’s TaMi:

In this level, Ta retains the same sound across all 3 phrases. This is going to make it slightly more difficult to differentiate between them.

You’ll need to pay more attention to the timing (instead of the sound alone) to recognise the phrases.

Here are this level’s challenges!

5. 2 phrases in combination:

6. 2 phrases in combination:

Level III

Now we really turn up the heat.

In this final set of challenges, you’ll no longer be able to rely on differences in sound to recognise phrases.

Every syllable now sounds like Ta. Consequently, TaKa and TaMi will each contain 2 identical sounds, only separated by different durations.

Here’s TaKa:

Here’s TaMi:

And finally, here’s the Boss Level. Go for it!

7. 1 phrase, repeated:

8. 2 phrases in combination:

9. 2 phrases in combination:

10. All 3 phrases in combination:

Fantastic work! Post what you’ve got in the comments!!

What’s Next?

We’ll extend our rhythmic system to be able to handle trickier rhythms.

Next → Part 15: Beat Symmetry

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