Metronome

A metronome (from Ancient Greek μέτρον (métron) 'measure' and νόμος (nómos) 'law') is a device that produces an audible click or other sound at a uniform interval that can be set by the user, typically in beats per minute (BPM).

Musicians—and others including dancers, athletes, and health professionals—often practise with a metronome to improve their timing, especially the ability to maintain a steady tempo with a regular beat or pulse.

[4] The word metronome first appeared in English in Maelzel's 1815 patent application, and is Greek in origin, derived from metron—"measure" and nomos—"regulation, law".

According to historian Lynn Townsend White Jr., the Andalusian inventor Abbas Ibn Firnas created "some sort of metronome" in the 9th century.

[7][8] Galileo Galilei studied and discovered key concepts involving the pendulum in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, famously inspired by a steadily swaying chandelier in Pisa Cathedral.

[9] In 1696, musician Étienne Loulié built a pendulum-based "chronomètre", consisting of a lead weight hanging from an adjustable string alongside a 6-foot (2 m) vertical ruler.

The more-familiar mechanical musical chronometre was invented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in Amsterdam in 1814, based on a spring-powered, inverted pendulum rod with fixed and adjustable weights to achieve compactness.

After the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, the 75-foot (23 m) electromechanical Prague Metronome was installed as a silent kinetic sculpture overlooking the city, an inverted pendulum symbolizing the passage of time.

Tones can differ in pitch, volume and/or timbre to distinguish downbeats from other beats, as well as compound and complex time signatures.

In recording studio applications, such as film scoring, a software metronome may provide a click track to synchronize musicians.

For example, a musician fighting a tendency to speed up might practise a phrase repeatedly while slightly slowing the BPM setting each time, to play more steadily.

A musician or athlete seeking to improve technical proficiency might set the metronome to gradually higher speeds until the desired tempo is achieved.

With more-advanced metronome technique, musicians practise separate exercises to strengthen their sense of rhythm, tempo, and musical time, while also cultivating flexibility and expression.

[31] To help build rhythmic flexibility and musical expression in performances, preparatory exercises with the metronome often incorporate a fluid sense of timing.

[32] As author/drummer Mac Santiago wrote: "The ability to hear the pulse and yet accelerate or decelerate slightly is a great way to incorporate human feeling into a musical performance.

[35] Also, in Ennio Morricone's theme "Farewell to Cheyenne" (featured in the film Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), the steady clip-clop beat is provided by the deliberately distorted and slowed-down sound of a mechanical metronome.

[38] This removes guesswork and aids musicians in various ways, including keeping tempos, countering tendencies to slow down or speed up unintentionally, monitoring technical progress, and increasing evenness and accuracy, especially in rapid passages.

This is in contrast with many musicians today, who practise with the metronome in the background for the entirety of a piece of music, generally leading to steadier performances.

[45] Oboist/musicologist Bruce Haynes described the role of the metronome in modern performance style in detail in his book The End of Early Music.

He emphasized that modern style is much more rhythmically rigid, compared with the effusive rubato and bluster characteristic of expressive 19th-century Romantic music.

Because of this, musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin called Modernism "refuge in order and precision, hostility to subjectivity, to the vagaries of personality".

[46] These qualities gave rise to the term metronomic, which music critics use to describe performances with an unyielding tempo, a mechanical rhythmic approach, and equal stress to all subintervals; violinist Sol Babitz considered it "sewing machine" style with limited flexibility.

[51] Even such highly rhythmical musical forms as samba, if performed in a culturally authentic style consistent with recordings by early practitioners, cannot be captured with the beats of a metronome.

[53] American composer and critic Daniel Gregory Mason wrote that the use of the metronome is "dangerous" because it leads musicians to play by the measure or beat instead of the phrase, at the expense of liveliness, instinct, and rhythmical energy, "a dead body in place of the living musical organism".

Humans rely on an innate sense of rhythm to perform ordinary activities such as walking, hammering nails or chopping vegetables.

[57] Even without singing, instrumentalists can strengthen their innate sense of pulse using quieter bodily rhythms, such as breathing, walking, foot tapping, or other activities.

Musicians can deal with timing and tempo glitches by learning to "hear an ideal performance in their mind" first, and by listening carefully to recordings of themselves and others.

In this view, rhythms that are subtly unsynchronized and uneven throughout can help to keep the music alive and interesting, and prevent any feeling of sameness and boredom.

Musicians may practise organizing notes and phrases into "musical gestures", patterns of motions that come naturally, rather than metronomically strict measures.