The Art Of Timing And How To Get It

Want to bring more expression into your music? Then join Dr Milton Mermikides as he provides a fascinating insight into timing, or how ‘placing’ your notes is vital for feel.

- Milton Mermikides

Music notation is an extremely useful tool as it reduces the immense complexities and variations in the ‘sound domain’ (with all its infinitesimal molecular vibrations) into the important musical parameters of pitch and rhythm (with some dynamic, timbre and expression information thrown in). This makes it a highly economical way of storing, communicating, reproducing and conceptualizing music. It allows us to quickly and efficiently capture musical ideas, transfer them between people who can read music (even if they don’t speak the same language) and across time from moments to centuries, a time capsule of musical intent.

From a contemporary perspective, comparing the hugely disparate file sizes of a music notation document to (even a file compressed) audio file will give you some idea of the level of reduction involved. In order to achieve this remarkable economy, much of the sonic information is rejected in order to prioritize a few features. More specifically, conventional notation presents notes as existing on a ‘grid’ of specific pitches (almost always 12 in each octave), and rhythms on a similar -albeit more finely sliced -grid of discrete points. With this system anything that falls between ‘important’ points on the grid may be considered any combination of inaccurate, approximate, tolerable or loose.