Daily Playlist — Complex Time Signature

Complex time signature refers to time meters that do not fit the usual duple or triple catergories.

Traditional music of the Balkans uses such meters extensively. Bulgarian dances include forms with 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 22, 25 and other numbers of beats per measure notated as additive rhythms. However, these irregular meters rarely appeared in formal written Western music until the 19th century.

In the contemporary music, complex time signatures occur mostly in avant-garde music, with progressive rock in particular making frequent use of them. Some well-known examples of shifting meters are The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” or Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.”

The use of such additive or shifting meters results in a time-bending quality. One of the compositions that push such use to the extreme, “The Dance of Eternity” by Dream Theater contains mixtures of faster and slower beat groupings. It goes through over 128 time signature changes in just over six minutes. The complex time signature itself can be an aesthetic device as well: Björk’s “Moon” is written with 17/8 time signature, with 4 harp sequences repeating throughout the song to resemble the lunar cycles.