[or] + [very] -- strong and weak beats
Musical measures divide into strong beats and weak beats. For example, 4/4 is counted as ONE two THREE four. Music borrows her older sister poetry’s groundbreaking idea of stressed and unstressed syllables and arranges them in more regular, almost biological, patterns.
The urge to obey the innate metrical structure of the bar is strong. Even composers famous for rhythmic adventurousness only occasionally resort to manually notated accents, like Stravinsky does in this passage from the Rite of Spring.
Instead, they usually juxtapose different time signatures and let the natural rhythm of the bars determine accent placement, as another excerpt from the same work shows.
This is enlightening. Another post advocates thinking of rhythm as primitive groups of 1, 2, or 3. If we go further and break Stravinsky’s 4/8 into 2 + 2, 5/8 into 3 + 2, 9/8 into 3 + 3 + 3, and 6/8 into 3 + 3, we also solve the beat problem.
1 = STRONG
2 = STRONG weak
3 = STRONG weak weak
Killing two birds with one stone is a sign of a very robust cognitive model.