Reading rhythms in sheet music

English

A majority of resources about reading rhythms in sheet music at the time of writing base their approach in conscious analysis. However, the final goal of rhythm reading is not to logically analyse, but to audiate. Rhythmic audiation is the ability to look at some notation and have it immediately play back in your head, much like words 'pronounce' themselves to you as you read English.

The logical and subconscious minds are largely separate, and understanding what rhythm notation logically means will do little to hep you read it. Rather, the skill of audiating rhythm notation can be developed more easily if you focus on training the subconscious directly through mimicry.

One can imitate rhythms by ear, or watch someone performing a rhythm by clapping or dancing, and copy what they are doing. Through repetition over a period of time, patterns become innate, an audio 'muscle memory'.

Once a pattern has been internalised, it is easy to associate with the equivalent representation in music notation, without ever needing to analyse the notation.

Putting it into practice

So let's put this idea into practice. Listen to the following rhythm, and as you do so, mirror the sound that you are hearing:

Vocalise it using 'da' 'da' sounds or similar.
You could also clap or otherwise move to the rhythm.

After repeating this a few times, after a few minutes, or possibly a day, you'll be able to perform the rhythm without the audio reference. At that point, imagine the same sound and / or body movement in your head while also performing it physically, and once that gets easy, try to just hear (audiate) the rhythm internally.

Once the rhythm has been internalised, it is straightforward to associate it with the equivalent music notation shown below:

Practice performing the rhythm while looking at the notation and after a day or few of practice, you'll find that upon looking at the notation the equivalent rhythm starts playing back to you in your mind's ear.

It may take some time for this to happen, and you may not see results until you sleep on it. Persistence and regularity is critical for this process to work because the mind only remembers things that you're using regularly.

But this process is analogous to how children learn to read. One's first words are learned by listening to their parents. Reading then comes later, from associating known sounds to the sight of the letters and words. That this happens is obvious from languages like English or French as many words are not written phonetically.

Rhythm figures

Intuition could suggest that learning to read rhythm notation using this approach would entail learning the rhythm of every song you want to play from start to finish from scratch. It could thus seem very complex, but this assumption is incorrect.

While rhythms are unique on a large scale, the story is different if we zoom in. Rhythms can be broken down into figures, short patterns analogous to words. The example above is built from the two figures shown below.

Figures are like lego bricks, they can be assembled in any order to form arbitrary rhythms, and the key point is that many rhythms are built from the same figures, just like different books can be written in the words of a common language.

By developing an intuition for the sound of different figures, how those figures sound in relation to an underlying beat, as well as how they sound when played before or after other figures, you will be able to read any rhythm constructed from those figures.

The following intentionally demonstrates this using very simple figures in order to be broadly understandable, but the learning process demonstrated can be applied to rhythms of arbitrary complexity.

Figures in the context of a beat

A rhythm figure can relate to a beat in various ways, it may use notes that subdivide the beat, span multiple beats, or rests that play nothing for some period of time. When we are learning to read music, it is important to develop an intuition for this relationship.

You can begin to get a sense for that relationship by preceding a figure with a context. Regardless of the time signature, there will be a note symbol that has the duration of one beat. You can put any figure into context by prefixing it with a series of these. For instance, if the figure is in 4/4 time, you can prefix it with a series of quarter notes.

Next, take a look through some sheet music that you have to find some rhythm figures. Write them out in a music notation software like MuseScore, adding preceding notes to put it into context. The result will look something like this:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Having familiarity with a prefixed figure, the next step is to learn to audiate the figure with the beat simultaneously, audiating both the notes of the figure, and the sound of the beat (metronome) underneath it.

An option is to hear the figure played over a metronome on repeat, and audiate everything you hear, the notes and the metronome, in your mind untill you can audiate it without the audio to reference..

A second option is to practice tapping the beat with one hand, while simultaneously performing the rhythm of the figure with your other hand. In order to do this, I'd recommend also starting with an audio version of the rhythm played over a metronome, and:

First, tap the rhythm of the metronome on a table with one of your hands.
Next tap the rhythm of the figure on a table using your other hand. Focus on this alone, without the hand you were tapping the metronome with.
Once they can be done separately, try to perform them at the same time.

When you can perform this, next try audiating the sound you hear while performing it, and then drop the physical performance.

Figures in the context of other figures

The other aspect to learn is how one figure sounds when following another figure. For example, working with the three figures, quarter note, quarter rest, and a pair of eighth notes, how do they sound if you pair them in different combinations?

It is easy to practice this exhaustively if you choose one of these, and sequentially play the other 3 after it:

Quarter followed by quarter.
Quarter followed by a pair of eighth notes.
Quarter followed by quarter rest.

And those sound like this:

Listen to each of these one by one, and clap it 10 to 20 times until it starts to become automatic.

Then if you repeat the same process starting with the other two figures, you can list every possible combination of these figures. For the 3 figures we have been using so far, there are 9 possible combinations, the 3 above, and the 6 following.

By practising the figures in this way, you internalise what every figure sounds like when it follows every other from the set. Thus, when you read rhythms built from them as you move from note to note you'll always know how it should sound. Here's a simple example to try it out:

Then try assembling some of your own rhythms that make use of these figures. This would also be a great jumping off point to start playing with improvisation.

Figures in different time signatures

So far we have just been discussing figures in their own right, but how do they relate to a time signature?

As we explored in The essence of rhythm notation, a time signature tells you how many and which kind of note you'll find in a bar of music. For example, the time signature '4/4' means 'four quarter notes',

The patterns of notes that you will find within a given time signature are based around this structure. For example, for rhythms in 4/4 time you'll often see patterns like the following:

In different time signatures, the patterns of notes that you encounter will also be different. Here for example are some patterns that you'll often see in 3/4 time:

By learning how different figures sound when played after each other as discussed earlier, reading them in different time signatures will be straightforward, as the relative relationship between the notes and the beat is the same.

Rather, the characteristic feel of these time signatures, like weather the rhythm is felt in groups of three or four, arises from the patterns of notes used. For example, notice how the pairs of 8th notes in the examples have been placed to highlight groupings into 4, and into 3.

Real performances also communicate grouping though how the notes are emphasised by a player, on the ocarina most commonly by using ornamentation. As noted in the article Getting Rhythm, this is a pattern you'll often hear with music in 4/4:

Strong, weak, strong, weak ...

Music does these things in many different ways, and it is worthwhile to find both sheet music for a few songs along with performances, and:

Look at the sheet music to see the time signature and general structure.
Listen to the music, and hear the emphasis pattern(s) that are being used.
Notice how the structure of the notes and emphasis in the performance relate to the notation. There will be aspects in the audio that are not notated.

Try clapping the rhythms from the sheet music over the recording, reproducing strong and weak beats by clapping harder or softer. Notice how these patterns relate to the patterns found in the notation. It can be helpful to use a digital audio workstation to loop small parts of a recording, see Playing your favourite songs on the ocarina for some tips.

How to develop your rhythmic vocabulary

Developing a large rhythmic vocabulary that will enable you to read the majority of rhythms you encounter is just a matter of applying the processes discussed. I'd suggest starting with a small selection of figures, such as:

Practice these as we explored earlier in the article, following each figure with every other one, in order to fully internalise the possibility space of rhythms they are able to represent.

By doing this, and practising rhythms built from those figures in different time signatures, it won't take long to reach a point where you can audiate any rhythm that can be created from this subset without needing to think.

And then it's just a matter of gradually introducing and practising new figures. But where do you find figures to practice?

It's easy to find large collections of rhythm exercises in the form of books, websites and apps, from which figures can be sourced.
The music you're learning is also a great place to source rhythm figures, with a clear advantage of helping to improve your ability to play the music you want to play.

Just be mindful that sourcing the rhythms from only a single music genre can pigeonhole what you learn. Make sure to reference a wide assortment of music to get a broad picture of what rhythms are used within real-world music.

The following are examples of things you'll encounter, and are a good starting point:

Groups of 8th and 16th notes

Beamed groups of 8th and 16th notes are very obvious figures, and these patterns show up over and over again in numerous genres of music.

Dotted rhythms

It's really common to see rhythms formed from a dotted note immediately followed by another note that brings the rhythm back into alignment with the beat, such as a dotted quarter note followed by an 8th note. The same idea shows up with other note durations.

And figures are often encountered with these same notes in the opposite order:

Triplets

A triplet is when 3 notes are played in the time duration of two, such as 3 quarter notes in the time of two. They have quite a distinctive sound:

The relationship between the triplet and a straight beat can be herd easily by preceding it with a context as above. You may initially find it helpful to connect the triplet rhythm with a 3 syllable word like 'pine-ap-le' or 'jaf-a-cake'.

Rhythms using ties

A tie joins the rhythmic value of two notes together into a single note. Ties are most often seen in rhythms where a note is played across a bar line:

The durations that are notated using ties are frequently equivalent to that of common note symbols, and the tied notes in this rhythm are equivalent to a half note. Using ties for cross-bar notes improves readability because it means that the first note symbol after a bar line always aligns with the downbeat.

Learning to audiate tied notes is much the same as discussed previously: isolate the tied note pair as a figure, and practise it in the context of other figures. Here it has been prefixed and followed by a quarter note to match the usage in the original rhythm, those can be substituted for any other figures to practice it in other contexts.

Once you're comfortable audiating the tied note figure in relation to some other figures, try reading it in the context of the original rhythm. It may feel different because the overall grouping and emphasis within the context of the rhythm is different, despite that the relative note durations being the same.

Tied rhythms that includes notes of different durations can be approached in much the same way. For instance, here is a rhythm with a tie to an 8th note, equivalent to a dotted quarter note and eighth note.

Just isolate the tied pattern as a figure, and practise it by listening to and clapping the rhythm while looking at the notation. I'd recommend forming such figures to contain a uniform number of beats so they can be looped seamlessly.

Ties are also used to notate rhythms that cannot be notated using the standard note symbols alone, and they can be practised in the same way, isolating the tied patterns into sensible figures, listening to them while looking at the notation, then putting them into different time signatures.

Syncopations

Think about what happens if you follow an eighth note with a quarter note in 2/4, 3/4 or 4/4. The quarter note would be delayed such that it 'bridges over' the next beat, and shifts the emphasis onto the off beat. This is called syncopation.

Here are some examples of common syncopations:

Syncopated rhythms show up in numerous genres of music including reggae and electronic dance music. Can you find any in the music you listen to?

In different time signatures, what is considered syncopated changes due to the location of the beat also changing.

Figures in compound time (3/8, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8)

As mentioned in The essence of rhythm notation, the time signatures 3/8, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 are used to notate music where each beat is split into three sub-beats.

The figures found in these time signatures are typically simple, consisting of the beamed group of 3 8th notes, and variations on that:

Note that the rhythmic subdivision within a group of 3 8th notes in these time signatures is frequently performed unevenly, the first note of the group being played slightly longer than written, and the other two notes are fit into the remaining time.

This is called either 'lilt' or 'swing' depending on the musical idiom and is done to emphasise the downbeat. The amount of lengthening is subtle, typically less than a dotted 8th note, and is thus not easy to notate, and never is is in my experience.

Weather or not this is done depends on the idiom and performer. It can be herd in a lot of Irish jig playing and is straightforward to learn by listening to a performer who is doing it, and imitating.

Beats on the half note (2/2, 3/2 and 4/2)

Not all music assigns the quarter note to the beat. Time signatures with a '2' at the bottom are commonly used to represent a rhythm where the beat is instead assigned to the half note. For example, in 2/2 you'd hear just one metronome click for each half note, instead of two that you'd hear in 4/4.

Learning how to audiate sheet music in these time signatures is quite straightforward having experience with reading other rhythms because the relative relationships between the notes is the same, a quarter note is still half as long as a half note, just their relationship to the beat has changed.

Because music notation is relational in this regard, it is valuable to learn how the proportional differences between notes sound, and how they sound in relation to a beat as two independent skills. It is possible to know the sound of any rhythm just from the relative lengths of notes, but this doesn't indicate where the emphasis should be.

To learn that, use a music notation software and write out some rhythms using figures that you're familiar with from 4/4 in 2/2 instead. Listen to it played back with a half-note metronome enabled, and practice audiateing both the metronome and the beat.

The main difference caused by changing the assignment of the beat in this way is to double the effective tempo, and change where the emphasis falls. Because of that, the figures that you encounter within these time signatures are largely the same as time signatures like 4/4.

It may not be clear though why music would do this, as opposed to just using shorter note values in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4. To some extent this is related to history, because it used to be common to notate music with longer notes, and there was a shift towards using shorter ones just due to cultural trends.

But besides that, assigning a different note symbol to the beat can improve readability and clarify communication. For example, if some music happens to be composed using small subdivisions of the beat, shifting to a longer note duration could avoid the need to use 32nd or 64th notes.

Using different time signatures can also help to communicate different playing styles. Waltzes, mazurkas and triple hornpipes are all in groups of 3 beats, but are played differently. Using the time signature '3/2' for triple hornpipes helps to differentiate them.

It is also not always the case that these time signatures mean that the half notes is assigned to the beat. A metronome mark may indicate something else, and a recording of a performance is always the most reliable reference for how something is meant to sound.

Closing

Learning to read rhythms is a process of practising different rhythmic patterns until they have been internalised. Once you have some figures, they may be practised in different combinations with other figures, allowing them to be audiated and performed from muscle memory in any order.

Learning how to read a diverse set of rhythms easily is mostly a matter of internalising the possibility space of rhythms that sheet music is able to represent, and this can be done by starting with a small number of figures and practising them in all possible orders.

The order that figures are learned doesn't matter that much, because anything you learn is going to expand your coverage of the possibility space. It's perfectly fine for a beginner to jump directly to learning complex figure patterns if you need them to play a song you love.