Forum: music.stackexchange.com
Tags: <time-signatures>
Title: Is there any real-world difference between time signatures such as 4/4 and 8/8?
Question: These days I pretty much play everything by ear, but was originally trained in strathspey and reel violin so realise I should know the answer to this, but I can't remember what, if any, the practical differences were.  Is there any difference between a score marked 4/4 and one marked 8/8? Or is that sort of thing only useful to indicate a time signature change within a piece of music?

Answers:
sents: text: A time signature is simply the composer's way of telling you how s/
text: he is subdividing the measure.
text: So in 4/4 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into four beats, while in 8/8 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into eight beats.
text: The difference is less in the strict timing and more in the feel or pulse of the music.
text: Try counting these out loud:
text: 4/4 time: "1-2-3-4-/1-2-3-4-"8/8 time: "12345678/12345678"2/2 time: "1---2---/1---2---" All three of these take up exactly the same amount of time, but to me, the 4/4 time feels steady, while the 8/8 time feels brisk and the 2/2 time feels stately.
text: In all three time signatures, a quarter note will have the same value—one quarter of the measure—but in 4/4 time, it represents the pulse of the music, while in 8/8, it's two pulses and in 2/2 time, it's half a pulse.
text: A difference in feel between 3/4 and 6/8 time can be even more obvious.
text: In 3/4 time, the measure is broken up into three distinct beats, as in a waltz.
text: In 6/8 time, by contrast, the measure is often broken up into two beats, each with a triplet feel.
text: Like this: 3/4 time: "ONE and TWO and TRE and/ONE and TWO and TRE and "6/8 time: "ONE two tre
text: FOR fiv
text: six/ONE two tre
text: FOR fiv six " If the composer writes three quarter notes in 3/4 time, it will feel like three notes on the beat.
text: But if the composer writes three quarter notes in 6/8 time, the second note may feel syncopated relative to the overall pulse of the music.
text: Update: Listen to the first twenty seconds or so of La Pistola y El Corazon by Los Lobos.
text: Is it in 3/4 or 6/8 time?
text: Depending on how you hear it, the music has a much different feel, with the lead guitars putting emphasis on different parts of the melody.
text: Listen a few times and try to hear it both ways!
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/36/Alex Basson
score: 115
sents: text: Adding to Alex's answer, There seem to be at least 2 factors in choosing a time signature
text: First way is disregarding
text: duplet/triplet feel one is how many beats there are in the bar, so often in the case of 7/16
text: it's all about just the number of 16ths in that bar.
text: in many prog rock passages and places where the time signature is constantly changing it's because the player wants to extend a repeated phrase by an odd amount
text: so they'll just stick the notes in the phrase and change the time signature bar to bar.
text: As a practical example, suppose you have a phrase of nine quavers, grouped 3 3 3.
text: One way often used by prog rockers is to alter one group to be different lengths in a passage(let's use the last group here), so perhaps it would go 333,336,333,332.
text: In time signature terms
text: what you would have there is 9/8,12/8,9/8,8/8, It doesn't make sense to define the 8/8 bar as 4/4 because it breaks the pattern.
text: The second way is considering the feel
text: This is where 3/4 and 6/8 commonly differ.
text: As you may know 3/4 is counted in duplets or 1+2+3+(3 groups of 2), whereas 6/8 is counted in triplets or 1+a2+a(2 groups of 3)
text: The same can be applied to 4/4 and 8/8, where the difference is that 4/4 is counted 1+2+3+4+(or 4 groups of 2) but 8/8 can be grouped as (3 3 2),(3 2 3) or (2 3 3)in
text: the example of 332 this would be counted 1+a 2+a
text: 3
text: + You could arguably use 4/4, but in this case 8/8 suggests the feel better. Also for extra fun, here is my favourite example on 8/8 time signatures
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/6629/Alexander Troup
score: 13
sents: text: There is one commonly-used time signature that is just wrong.
text: 6/8 literally means that there are six beats in the measure, and an eighth note gets one beat.
text: Almost always there are two beats in the measure and
text: a dotted quarter note gets one beat.
text: But there is no readable way to write that.
text: 2/(8/3)?
text: 2/2.666?
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/113/Mark Lutton
score: 6
sents: text: In 4/4 time, the concept of pulse is assigned to the quarter note beat.
text: However, in 8/8 time, which would seem to be similar, the sense of pulse is completely open-ended.
text: Often time signatures in 8 have a dotted quarter note pulse, such as 6/8, 9/8, 12/8, but in a time signature like 8/8, which is not historically used, the composer is free to subdivide as they choose.
text: This could technically be any variation of 3+3+2.
text: Basically, the difference is in the subdivision.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/85/cotroxell
score: 4
sents: text: As an arranger, I have once used 8/8 as a time signature.
text: I wanted the performance to emphasise the nature of the quaver as the pulse, while recognising that the melody was easier to recognise as 4/4 than 4/8, thus preserving its legato style.
text: 8/8 also led to a saner tempo marking...
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/647/Iain Hallam
score: 4

Summary of the answers:
The difference is less in the strict timing and more in the feel or pulse of the music.  iin 4/4 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into four beats, while in 8/8 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into eight beats.  
In 4/4 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into four beats, while in 8/8 time, the composer imagines the measure divided into eight beats.   The difference is less in the strict timing and more in the feel or pulse of the music.