Forums > Beginner Poi Moves > Beats 4 moves and Beats 4 music

Posted: 24th Jun 2004
Hmm, I've written a fair amount of "electronic music" though I have to say my attempts at dance music were dismal failures, in fact the term 'laughable' would not be an exaggeration. I certainly write in quite a variety of rhythms...I'm fond of alternating 5/8 with 6/8 or, more classically, 6/8 with 3/4 ("I like to be in Amer-i-ca/OK by me in Amer-i-ca!").

It mystifies me that people don't like to dance to jagged assymetrical rhythms. *I* certainly do; that's why I write that way. Wrote a whole piece once where there were about four voices, and you couldn't find the 'one' in any of them -- and if you picked a 'one' for one voice, it wouldn't match the other three voices, and it'd be in a different place next time around. People who listen to it either make me turn it off right away, or get this very far-off kind of look...

I'm evil like that.

I'm pretty new to this poi thing, but it sure seems to me like most of the music I've heard, even Trance, has beats that are much shorter (i.e. faster) than the "beats" you talk about when you say e.g. "five beat weave." I thought this piece I know (not mine) called "Fire Dance" would be perfect for, uh, fire dancing, but the really cool part is in a fast 7/8, and I bet nobody can do a 7-beat weave (is there such a thing?) fast enough to keep up. (Well, maybe NYC. I'll ask him next time I see him.)

The way the singers sing it, it's actually more of a 3.5/4 time. A measure goes quarter, quarter, quarter, eighth. So maybe more of a truncated 4/4 than anything else.

Sigh. Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

"If you didn't like something the first time, the cud won't be any good either." --Elsie the Cow, Ruminations

Posted: 24th Jun 2004
Oh, and: very densely-patterned music gives you something to match up to with just about any move you care to make. At least, that's true when you're just dancing. Since most people aren't so good at dancing, "dance music" tends to be very loosely patterned, with big thuds on the beats so they won't get lost.

Y'all are way better than that, right? A good dancer can dance to anything; I want to believe the same is true of poi.

"If you didn't like something the first time, the cud won't be any good either." --Elsie the Cow, Ruminations

Posted: 24th Jun 2004

Written by:

---

It mystifies me that people don't like to dance to jagged assymetrical rhythms.

---

You and me both, mate . Similarly the idea that you have whole nights of music based round a single rhythm (e.g. a trance/techno/hip hop night...) seems strange... The thing that makes me smile most when I'm out dancing is when the music catches me out.

Putting my rhythm geek hat on, 7/8 kinda *is* 3.5/4 - that is, with 7/4, you'd expect 7 full beats, so it would be like a bar of 4 and a bar of 3 (for example), but with 7/8 you'd only expect 3 and a half beats - like a truncated 4 or an extended 8. Most of the 7/8s I've heard have been 2 2 3, or 2 2 2 1 depending on how much the last quaver gets accented. I love 7, I think it's got the nicest groove. I don't like to do wierdy time signatures just for the hell of it, they've got to groove.

But getting back to the spinning, I don't always find that my sense of beats to spin to always lines up with muisical beats. I think quite often I like to line up patterns and bars, so I might fit a 3 beat pattern to a 4 beat bar. I find the beats in spinning much less critical than the beats in music - there's still a rhythm there, but it doesn't work in quite the same way. That might be partly cos I tend to do staffs more than poi, so I can maul the timing more , but I think it's also that beats are a way of counting for spinning, rather than an intrinsic part of the structure - a rhythm is defined by the temporal arrangement of sound, while a "move" (if they exist ) is defined by an ongoing set of *spatial* relationships (which do of course have to be embedded in time, but you get what I mean, perhaps...)

Written by:

---

A good dancer can dance to anything; I want to believe the same is true of poi.

---

Yes mate. I'd spin happily to early choral music, or flamenco, or electroacoustic craziness or anything you wanted to throw at me.

But having a good beat does make it easier

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 24th Jun 2004
A lot of good psytrance has variations between time signitures, the best known example is probly Hallucinogen : Jiggle of the Sphinx which plays between a waltz and 4/4 (it varies over time).

as for dancing on the beat, everyone reckons I dance on the beat, but only with buttefly variations. when weaving it, I just cruise around and do turns and stuff which match the rythms and stuff. I think phrase matching is more important than matching individual beats. theres not much expression if you only match beats...

Josh

--
Help! My personality got stuck in this signature machine and I cant get it out!

Posted: 25th Jun 2004
Ha, this maybe an old thread but I still need help, as I'm still pretty ignorant of all this beat stuff.

I still like to spin on the beat, especially with butterfly and parallel moves because I find that without music spinning just becomes practice and doing tricks.

My favourite is spinning to (what I'm told is) 7/8. Someone told me that 7/8 was marching music. Anyhow, I associate this with "running man", but I'm not really sure of the tempo. If the music is to quick for me, then I just slow down and do everything at half pace. Confused or what?

If we as members of the human race practice meditation, we can transcend our fear, despair, and forgetfulness. Meditation is not an escape. It is the courage to look at reality with mindfulness and concentration. Thich Nhat Hanh

Posted: 25th Jun 2004
OK, probably being slightly pedantic, but I think clearer understanding of rhythm is a good thing, and it always helps if everyone's speaking the same language


Josh - Jiggle of the Sphinx stays in 4 all the way through, but goes into triplet feel halfway (changes from 4/4 to 12/8). There's still 4 beats in the bar, but they get divided into 3 rather than 2. Waltzes are in 3/4, so there's 3 beats to each bar.

Stone - It's unlikely that what you're spinning to is 7/8 (got any names?) especially if someone's calling it march music. Marches are pretty much always in 4, as you need that to go "left, right, left, right" to, and only a very small percentage of modern music is in anything other than 4

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 25th Jun 2004
monkey's are your brain

I don't know Jiggle of the Sphinx but why is it 12/8? I'm just wondering why there is a distinction made betwen 6/8 and 12/8 in general?

I live in a world of infinite possibilities.

Posted: 25th Jun 2004
The /8 signatures are one of the more confusing bits of time signatures - it's not the most elegant notation. The distinction between 6/8 and 12/8 is the same as the one between 4/4 and 2/4; it's not a completely scientific one, really - it just makes more sense to count 4 beats to the bar for these rather than 2. In some sense it's about the length of the smallest repeating unit, but really a lot of it is convention, and what feels natural. And people don't always agree... For example in latin music, some people would write a clave (the basic rhythm) as two bars of 4/4, using quavers, and some would write it as one bar of 4/4, using semiquavers. They'd all tap their feet at the same rate though

Hmmm, it's really hard to talk about this without being able to tap fingers and listen to the same bit of music. I guess mostly you know where the beat is. So then you'd have to count how many are in a bar, and then if it's triplet feel multiply by three and put an 8 on the bottom. Simple

Oh, and xopher - dancing about architecture - isn't that pk?

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 25th Jun 2004
wooo ok - thats for clearing that up

Josh

--
Help! My personality got stuck in this signature machine and I cant get it out!

Posted: 27th Jun 2004
Mo-seph - I got it from Laurie Anderson...not sure if it was hers originally.

Stone: The thing about triple rhythms is that the beat unit is a dotted note. Thus 6/8 isn't six beats, each an eighth note; it's two beats, each a dotted quarter (quaver). So (taking each syllable as an eighth note) 6/8 goes ONE-and-and-TWO-and-and, whereas 3/4 (superficially the same, reducing fractions and all) goes ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and.

So then you see 7/8. WTF?!?! It can be either 7 beats, or some combination of duple and triple beats adding up to 7 eighth notes. Or (oddly) it can be three duples an a half beat. So two measures of it go ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and-FOUR-ONE-and... That means there's no way to count it just by knowing that it's in seven; and it can shift ways of counting from one measure to the next, or even between parts. So you can't necessarily stay on the beat, because the beat keeps moving.

"If you didn't like something the first time, the cud won't be any good either." --Elsie the Cow, Ruminations