From the course: Learning Music Notation
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Time signatures and bar lines
- [Instructor] Now that we've got a good start with note values, it's time to begin discussing how musical time is organized and notated. It should be stressed that time is notated in a manner directly related to the recurring rhythmic accents and patterns inherent in a song or composition. In simpler terms, notated music is or should be derived from the rhythmic feel or groove. So to make music easier to read, musical time is divided in to equal segments or chunks called measures. So as we look at this graphic here, we can see that what looks like equal amounts of time are separated by these vertical lines. Now these vertical lines are called bar lines, and the area between each bar line is called a measure. Sometimes measures are referred as bars as well, but the more appropriate word is measures, so we've got a bar line on the left hand side to indicate the beginning of a new staff, and then we've got one here that indicates the end of the first measure, another that indicates the…
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