For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
Yeah a lot of ways to write it, and that’s part of it - depending on the tempo and phrasing it may be easier or harder to read the music in different time signatures, so there’s some flexibility. Like in 3/4 if you have phrasing that would carry a note from beat three across to beat one of the next bar, in a lot of places, that’s messier to write and read than if it’s e.g a quarter note within a 6/8 bar.
And a whole note is always the length of the bar, so in 6/8 a whole note isn’t eight beats, it’s six. The bottom number represents what length note counts as one beat - in 6/8 an 8th note is one beat (and there would be 6 8th notes per bar) a quarter note is two beats, a half note is three and a whole note is six.
I’m betting different composers had preferences as well.
You’re confusing a bar with a measure. The measure is the smaller interval.
Also, the bottom number is how many beats are in a whole note. Because there are 8 beats in a whole note, that means an eighth note is one beat. A whole note is 8 beats in 6/8 time. Just like it’s 4 beats in 3/4.
The top number is how many beats per measure. i.e., 6 eighth notes in 6/8 time; 3 quarter notes in 3/4 time.
Wait, so then what’s the difference between a bar and measure?!
I think I get it, so a whole note is 8 beats and there’s 6 to a measure, so the whole note carries on for two beats into the next measure, ya?
Yes, pretty much.
If a note is a letter and a measure is a word, then a bar is like a sentence. Typically 4 or more measures make up a bar, and they sometimes span more than one line. When you see a measure that ends with two vertical lines, that’s the end of a bar.