Beats per minute
The tempo of a piece of music can be specified in the unit of measure beats per minute (abbreviated bpm or BPM ). “ B eats p er m inute ” stands for “ beats per minute ”. The historically older name for the number of beats per minute is " Mälzel's metronome " (abbreviated to MM ). The beats / beats often correspond to quarter notes (with measures like 4 ⁄ 4 , 3 ⁄ 4 , 2 ⁄ 4 ). For bars with an 8 in the denominator, such as 3 ⁄ 8 , 6 ⁄ 8 , 9 ⁄ 8 or 12 ⁄ 8 , there are two different ways of counting:
- three eighths are combined as a beat, or
- every eighth note is considered a single beat.
The latter option results in a much higher BPM value - how the music is actually counted should be based on the weighting of the individual beats. In practice, it has to be analyzed whether the focus is actually on the dotted quarter or on the individual eighths.
music and dance
The term beats per minute became popular in the disco era and is mainly used today in dance and electronic dance music . Because it does not differ from the MM tempo indications, it can be measured with a conventional metronome, but also electronically. Since normal bodily functions of a person run at 72 heartbeats per minute, these are the norm for the question of whether the frequency of the beats per minute has a stimulating or calming effect on the recipient. Tempi with a high frequency (over 72 bpm) have a stimulating effect, while those with less than 72 bpm have a calming effect.
Hip-Hop typically has tempos between 70 and 120 bpm, while House is faster at 110 to 140 bpm. The jungle is even faster with 140 to 190 bpm, while terror tempos over 200 bpm and speedcore and speed metal even reach up to 300 bpm, which corresponds to five beats per second. These typical values are not to be understood as absolute and style-defining information.
In dance sport , tempo information is also common as the number of bars per minute (referred to as MPM , measures per minute , in German also TPM , bars per minute , often simply with beats ). They result from the corresponding bpm numbers by dividing them by the number of beats per measure. For example, a bpm value of 200 with a 4 ⁄ 4 cycle results in 50 cycles per minute.
Common BPM of various electronic music genres
| genre | Range (in bpm) |
|---|---|
| Hip-hop , rap , trip-hop | 60-110 |
| Acid jazz | 80-126 |
| Tribal House | 120-128 |
| House , Garage House , Disco House , Electro House | 120-135 |
| Dubstep | 128-160 |
| Trance , hard house , hands up , hard style | 128-155 |
| Jungle , drum and bass , happy hardcore , hardcore | 160-190 |
| Hi-Tech (Psy, Dark, Forrest) | 170-300 |
| Hardcore techno , gabber , Frenchcore | > 160 |
| Black metal , death metal | <320 |
| Speedcore | 250-700 |
| Splintercore | 700-1000 |
Non-musical meanings
water sports
In Canoeing is the number of paddle strokes per minute (also beat number called) indicator of the speed of the motion sequence, as in rowing .
medicine
In English, beats per minute refers to the medically measured heart rate . Here, too, the same Mälzel unit of measurement is used, which is identical to the musical measure MM.
See also
Web links
- Converter of BPM values and sample lengths
- BPM database - with around 23,000 entries , bpmdatabase.com
swell
- ↑ discjockey101.com ( Memento from April 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive )