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?”
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.