The Craft of Contemporary Commercial Music

Chapter 2

Introduction to Rhythm

This chapter focuses on rhythm, a general term used to describe the time-based or temporal organization of music. More specifically, however, rhythms can be defined as durations of sound and silence in music. Perceptually speaking, rhythms give rise to a phenomenon known as meter, a perceived grouping of strong and weak stresses in music that themselves are called pulses or beats. While meter does not typically exist without rhythms, it can be difficult to understand rhythm (especially rhythmic notation) without first comprehending the variety of common meters. This “meter first” method is echoed in the workflows used within digital audio workstations. As you may recall from the Introduction, rhythms are cast ...