[dahart]

> You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention.

Huh, maybe you are violently agreeing with @nerflad? I read the parent comment to mean that convention is the only thing that matters.

> You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it.

Why the snark and personal attack? You have no idea what @nerflad understands intellectually. I’m always surprised when someone with your level of HN karma hasn’t learned to avoid insults and condescension in comments like yours. Are you threatened by the idea that there’s more that one right way to write a tempo?

> Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another.

I think that definition of rhythm is very bad. Rhythm can exist without a human perceiving it. Google dictionary’s definition sounds better: “a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound”. So does Wikipedia’s: “Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time can apply to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to several seconds (as with the riff in a rock music song); to several minutes or hours, or, at the most extreme, even over many years.”

So, in summary, the meaning of the word pretty much is mere timing. Your treatise on perceptual psychology is talking about something else.

> The 3/4 vs 6/8 distinction is a historic convention, not something in the math.

Isn’t that exactly what @nerflad was saying??

[quadrangle]

Apparently, there was mostly miscommunication and the two of us probably agree entirely at the end of the day. The ad hominem aspects of my post weren't warranted really, and I don't care to explain why I fell into it in this case. I didn't mean to be snarky or violent or anything.

Anyway, the post I was replying to didn't say that the difference is due to convention, it asserted the difference didn't exist.

And I stand by my points about rhythm (which I think @nerflad would agree with in the end incidentally).

The "strong and weak" part from Wikipedia only exists in music in the mind of a person. It's not musically strong or weak based on physics of sound waves. Whether something is loud or quiet can be relevant to describing rhythm generically, but music is 100% subjective.

Human beings predictably experience certain musical things in certain ways, especially those from the same music cultures. But a full 100% of everything in music is only music when there are listeners (or just imaginers) having a subjective experience. Otherwise, there is no music. Pressure waves in air or dots on paper are not music.

I don't care what Google's dictionary says. Describing a trite, pithy one-sentence thing for a complex concept is necessarily going to be simplistic.