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| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
this is like considering architecture by how high above sea level it is.
completely unrelated to the quality |
Not true. A song's tempo is important because songs are written specifically to be in a certain tempo range. Most trance is written in 'allegro' which means literally 'at ease'. Switch to Drum and Bass and that is typically 'presto' - fast. Gabber Hardcore is typically written specifically to be in 'prestisimo' which is very fast.
Note: Music written with a slower tempo can have smaller notes in quicker succession without sounding like a complete torrent. The faster the tempo, the less of this you can get away with, without it sounding weird and wrong. This is why very fast hardcore is often very 'bare' in terms of its instrumentation and in terms of the musical elements in most of these tracks. It is this way partly by design.
A psytrance arpeggio sounds great at allegro speeds. It sounds stupid at prestismo speed. Similarly, speed up a slow breaks tune to gabber speeds and listen to the groove crumble.
Tempo is more than just speed. It is connected to the mood in which the music is composed and the intented frame of mind it intends to put the listener into.
| quote: | | What about just pure sound, or pulses of sound ala a-tonal or chance music or music concrete. You know the really experimental, minimalist stuff done in the early 1900s and is still done to this day by various performers, some that just record silence with slight pulses. Wouldn't that be almost 0 BPM? There really wouldn't be much besides these fragments of sound...Richie Hawtin has experimented with this kind of stuff, esp when he was releasing stuff under the Plastikman alias. Also Pan Sonic does some really crazy stuff, some of the most minimal and just plain weird "music" i've heard. |
No ambient music does not have 0 BPM. Alot of ambient music does actually have a tempo or some kind of cyclical pattern to beatmatch to. At least, in part. However, the key difference is that ambient music does not have a stable or fixed tempo. So whilst you can probably beatmatch on parts of an ambient tune, you wont have it synced for very long before it starts to wander off at a different speed. It can change alot over the course of a song and its often not deliberate.
This is why ambient DJs swing tunes out of intros or outros or simply layer ambient songs for interesting timbres and textures, crossfading at times when it sounds appropriate for the mood of the event. Its a completely different way of spinning records.
Last edited by Derivative on May-31-2006 at 19:07
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