The pros and cons of counting rhythms

English

Counting is another approach to learning to read rhythms that works by counting over a metronome. If you put on a metronome and count once per metronome click you hear, in time with the click, what you are doing is counting a regular division of time.

Each of these counts can be assumed to represent the time period of some note symbol. For example, you may assign the quarter note to the count:

The count defines a grid of equal duration time periods which notes can slot into. If the quarter note is equal to one count, then:

A half note gets two counts.
A dotted half note gets 3 counts.
A whole note gets 4 counts.

Counting can thus be used to perform the rhythm by considering how many counts each note should be held for. If you have two half notes in 4/4 time, the first half note spans counts one and two, while the second one spans 3 and 4.

A dotted half note and quarter note, the first would be held over counts 1, 2, and 3, and the quarter note would be played over count 4, and a whole note spans all 4 counts.

Rests can be counted the same as notes, but not playing them. Shorter notes can be handled by using a doubled or quadrupled count. Ties can be approached by considering how many counts the total duration of the tied noes span.

In all probability, you've seen this before. This system of counting is the most commonly taught approach for rhythm reading.

With regards to the pros:

It is easy to understand the logic behind it and how to apply that to reading basic rhythm notation independently. This is probably why it is so common, there are tens of thousands of resources teaching it.
How to count rhythms can be taught easily in print media, which is incapable of reproducing sound.
Counting can serve as a means of logically understanding what rhythm notation literally represents.
Using a vocal association with different rhythm patterns may be an effective memory aid.
Counting provides a means of deliberately practising rhythms against a metronome.

However this learning approach also has quite a number of challenges that may not be obvious.

The cons of counting rhythms

People learn most easily when things are learned gradually, by associating related information. for example, a child will learn to speak just by listening to their parents and others speaking, they spend several years just listening, and imitating the sounds they are hearing. Reading comes later, once they already have considerable experience.

It is straightforward to mimic this approach with rhythm by braking a rhythm into figures, and teaching rhythm figures by ear first, clapping them until they become muscle memory. One can then associate this with the notation, it is easy and intuitive because one is associating the sight of the notation with a performance that they are already familiar with.

By comparison, the process of learning rhythms by counting is essentially backwards: the knowledge of how a rhythm should sound does not yet exist. That gap is filled by:

Using logical analysis to reverse-engineer how to count a rhythm.
Consciously performing this count over a metronome repeatedly, until it becomes muscle memory.
Only once the rhythm has become muscle memory can it be associated to the notation subconsciously, allowing for fluent reading.

This approach does have the advantage of allowing you to work out the sound of a rhythm without needing to hear it, but it does have challenges.

First, if you learn rhythms by ear by listening to human performances, you'll simultaneously hear all of the details within their articulations, emphasis, and other inflections. Learning those will be natural. If you learn by counting, all of that information is just missing.

Second, there will be a lot of redundancy in what you are practising, It is most often taught that one should do this for each bar of music from the start of a piece to the end. The notes in music are not random, and so the same rhythm patterns will be encountered over and over again,

If one practices counting rhythms like this from start to finish, the patterns will start to enter muscle memory and it will become possible to audiate them. However, if you observe people who have been taught in this way, frequently they will be reading music and playing smoothly, and then abruptly stall.

This happens most often because they have encountered something that is either new to them, or not fully learned. Reading stalls because the conscious mind must interrupt to work out how to count something. This can be really frustrating, but is easily avoided with a small change in learning approach.

Finally, I also feel that it is not clearly communicated what the end goal of counting actually is. The goal is to repeat the patterns such that one learns to audiate rhythm notation, the ability to look at some notation and automatically hear how it would sound in one's head .

Once a rhythm can be audiated, the process of counting can be discarded, but this is never stated in my experience. If one continues to consciously count rhythms it will be a hindrance when playing at higher tempos.

A better way of utilising counting

First, I wish to state that counting rhythms is not essential to learning how to read rhythms competently, because it can also possible to do so by ear, and there are various other approaches such as Kodaly rhythm syllables..

But if you do want to try counting, Instead of trying to count through the whole rhythm from start to finish for every piece of music, first look through the entire song and look for things that you can't audiate. Take those things and make them into short exercises that you can practice by themselves. Write each pattern out on manuscript paper.

Once you have these:

Work out the counting for each sequence and write it above the notes.
Practice counting it repeatedly to a metronome at a low tempo, until you can audiate the rhythm and the pattern of the rhythm starts to become muscle memory.
Once you can perform the rhythm easily, discard the conscious counting and perform the rhythm from muscle memory.

By doing this, you ensure that when you do read the music, there will not be any unfamiliar rhythms that will cause you to stall. Writing the counting above the notes reduces the pressure being put on short term memory, and won't harm your learning.

Taking this a step further, you can breaking the rhythm down into smaller figures, and practice them paired with other figures in all possible combinations. The core of this approach is discussed in the article Reading rhythms in sheet music, and allows you to systematically internalise the possibility space of rhythms that can be made with a given set of figures.

Remember that the function of counting rhythms is not to perform this process while playing music, because that would put a lot of workload onto the conscious mind. It is slow and would quickly get in the way as you play more complex music.

The process of counting itself is a means to an end that one should be seeking to discard.

Other things to be aware of

Correct counting does not equal correct performance

Just because you are saying the syllables of a count correctly does not mean that the rhythm you are producing is correct. The time duration between the counts could be inconsistent. Because of this, having an audio reference like a metronome or experienced musician, and the skill of hearing if a note one is performing is early, late, or in time is still critical.

Counting isn't always representative of human performance

As already hinted, a big limitation of counting is that it forces everything into a mathematical straight jacket. The rhythm produced from counting is often not what an experienced player would perform, as they will alter the timing for expressive reasons.

Different musical genres vary their rhythms in unique ways, and those details can only be learned by listening to and imitating musicians experienced with playing a given genre of music.

Counting can obscure the existence of phrases

As explored in Finding musicality in sheet music, music is structured into phrases and these phrases do not have to start and end in the middle of a bar. You may for instance encounter music with a phrase like the following:

If someone is taught counting without first being aware of the larger structures of music, it can be easy for them to falsely conclude that the structure of music is strictly always aligned with the count and bar lines. This can then lead to them grouping and emphasising notes in ways that don't match the music.

In such cases it may be more intuitive to count in relation to the phrasing as follows. Counting is just a tool for practising rhythms and there is no harm in adapting it as long as you know how and why you're doing so.

Counting tuplets is unintuitive

Counting seeks to fit a rhythm into a uniformly spaced grid, and it isn't obvious how one should do this for any rhythm that does not follow a regular 'division by two' structure. as is the case for tuplets. Tuplets temporally change the subdivision of a rhythm, for example taking 3 notes, and playing them in the time duration of two notes of the same value, so exactly how is one supposed to count this?

Counting tuplets entails finding a common divisor for the whole rhythm. For example in the following case with a triplet, all of the notes can be fit into a regular grid if the longest note in the rhythm is subdivided into 3:

The subdivision needed depends on the note durations that are used within the entire rhythm, and being able to apply this to any random rhythm you encounter would entail learning to count rhythms at numerous different levels of subdivision, and learning how to quickly identify which to use depending on the subdivisions that a given rhythm uses.

In practice, people very rarely do this, and tuplets are mainly learned by ear, combined with word associations. Three note tuplets sound similar to a word like 'tri-pa-let', 'jaf-a'cake' and 'pine-ap-le'..

If you wish to count tuplets, a more practical approach is to isolate the tuplet as a figure, precede it with a context, and then work out how to count just this. Practice it until it has become muscle memory, and then perform the figure within the original rhythm without counting it.

Too many subdivisions!

You may have already realised that counting has challenges with notes of very short durations, as each level of subdivision doubles the amount of information to keep track of. For example, here is one way that you might count a bar of 32nd notes in 3/4:

When performed, 32nd notes are usually very brief, frequently so much so that it may be impossible to consciously count them at the final performance tempo, or even anything close to it, depending on how quickly you can think.

If you wish to count such things, they can be approached much the same as with tuplets. You separate the 32nd note part into a figure prefixed with some notes to put it in a content, and then count it repeatedly at a slow tempo until you can perform it from muscle memory, then discard counting and use a metronome to gradually speed it up to the final tempo.

However, practising in that way leaves a considerable divide between the practice tempo, and the tempo at which you will eventually be performing the rhythm. That split makes it difficult to then imagine what the end result will sound like without having an audio reference available.

Any note symbol can be assigned to the count, not only the quarter note

Time signatures with a '2' at the bottom represent a rhythm where the beat is assigned to the half note, and it's easiest to see how this works considering how you would count them.

For example, 2/2 is counted like 2/4 and the half note aligns with the numbered count. Thus, quarter notes are counted like 8th notes would be, and 8th notes counted like 16th notes would be.

If you were to take something in 4/4, and move it to 2/2 at the same tempo, it would be played twice as fast (unless you are told otherwise with a metronome mark).

Mainstream counting syllables don't communicate the difference between 3/4 and 3/8 or 6/8

It is commonly taught to count both the time signatures '3/4', and 6/8' using the count '1, 2, 3', which can be confusing because these are frequently used to represent different things in real world music.

Typically, 3/4 is used to represent music structured into groups of 3 beats, while 3/8 instead commonly represents music in groups of a single beat, where each beat has been split into 3 sub-beats.

I feel it provides more clear communication if the number counts are used to represent the beat, and so '1, 2, 3' can be used for 3/4:

Then instead of also using the counting '1,2,3' for 3/8, '1,2,3,4,5,6' for 6/8 and so on, 3/8 can instead be counted '1, e, a', and 6/8 counted '1, e, a, 2, e, a':

Closing thoughts on counting rhythms

Western music developed at a more technologically primitive time. If a mechanical metronome and your own ability to count are your only tools available, it is easy to see how counting rhythms would become the default teaching approach.

We today have considerably more technology available to us, such that it is trivial to convert any notated rhythm you encounter into audio you can hear.

Counting can be useful tool in the practice of music, providing a means of logically understanding what rhythm notation literally describes, to work out how a rhythm would sound without needing to hear it, or as a means of consciously practising against a metronome.

However, I do not believe that counting should be put on a pedestal as 'the only valid method of teaching rhythm'.

The process of counting rhythms has a number of obvious failings, and I feel that rudimentary counting is often taught to beginner musicians, allowing them to read simple rhythms, who are then left stranded not having a clue how to proceed when they try to read more complex notation.

This is why I opted to teach rhythm by ear in Serious Ocarina Player: it is obvious to see how the approach may apply to any extant rhythm notation. Educators should be seeking to empower learners to pursue things independently, and I do not think it OK to begin with an approach that leaves people asking 'How do you count this?'.

The process of learning rhythm involves training the subconscious brain to predict when a series of notes should be played in time, counting does this through conscious repetition against a metronome. Learning rhythms by ear instead achieves the same thing by directly imitating correct audio performances of rhythm figures.

Both approaches can be used to deeply internalise the possibility space of rhythms that music notation can represent. What I would suggest is to try different approaches, learning rhythms by ear, and counting, then apply them as you feel works best for your own music practice.

But know that there will always be aspects of human performance that are impossible to represent through counting, because they would require subdividing time into units so small they would exceed the capacity of the logical mind.

While it is possible to mathematically analyse it, the art of music is not mathematics. Music is a form of human artistic and emotional expression, and any learning approach which allows you to express yourself is valid.