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Musical Rhythm and Syllables

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    Musical Rhythm and Syllables

    I watched the George Harrison documentary at the weekend. There's the bit where Ravi Shankar is teaching him sitar and Indian time signatures and Harrison is talking about the challenge of adapting this to Beatles-pop and it got me thinking.

    In English, all numbers up to 10 except 7 are are single syllables, so counting in music lends itself to 4/4 time. Even 7 fits.

    But other languages don't lend themselves to numerical counting in at all. Egyptian arabic - wahid, itneen, talata, arbar; it just doesn't work for 4/4 pop music from my experience of Egyptian tastes, they could never quite understand western music because it was too basic, without stories and leading vocals (however, Egypt had crazy love for George Michael, lots of students would tell me they didn't like western music, "but I like George Michael, Careless Whisper".)

    I don't know enough about music to know whether counting into 4 would have much impact on western classical or jazz, but I imagine it does.

    So, I guess what I'm trying to find out is if being able to count in or not is an accepted factor in why music from different cultures is different, or not.

    #2
    Jazz is less constrained than pop but then most westerners went off jazz when it started to become more free. Similarly progressive rock is looser but a minority taste. I don't think it's counting so much as industrialization creating standardization of work rhythms. Music is more regimented because work has conditioned us that way.

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