Quote:
Originally Posted by Afro Blue
we western trained ears focus on music based in 4 beats per bar, everything that's played on the radio and the music done by everyone is that signature (usually). And Indian music extends this by playing in 6, 8, 12, 36 beats per bar...
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4 is generally referred to as common time, but you'll find people who also refer to 3 and 6 as being common time as well.
Indian music simply doesn't rely on these types of structures. if one were to map out indian music within this framework, he would have himself a big convoluted mess. it's not a matter of numbers in that music at all, but rather syllables. 6, 8, 12, (16, 24) and 32 are all common time as well, as the underlying pulse uses a denominator of 3 or 4 in all of them. indian music - again, if mapped out within the western framework - would be wrought with every number under the sun, as speech follows no numerical guidelines.
popularized indian music is a pretty obvious divergence from this though. ravi shankar in particular seemed to have a penchant for using the tones of home over top the rhythms of the west. the result is obviously something that people over here quite liked, but it was really not a traditional approach to the music of india at all.
the use of the term "micro tones" is something i've noticed a lot in conversations about indian music, and i think a lot of people are misled about what it implies. micro tones are basically the tones between the intervals in our standard octave. the thing is that our octave is still very much present in india, as it likely is in all of the universe. those intervals were found because they are inherent to harmonic resonance. the micro tones being referred to by people in conversations like this are basically the equivalent of the path a slide guitarist takes or someone using bends a lot might employ to arrive at a naturally harmonic resolve. the micro tones themselves would sound just as dissonant and unpleasant if used for resolution as playing an instrument noticeably out of tune.