Example
A rhythm, taken out of context and with no annotation, cannot be played. Indeed, to understand and perform a rhythm, one needs to know the surrounding ecosystem, called the meter. This word was already used by the Greeks to characterize the rhythmic pattern of a verse. Verses were sorted according to the length of the syllables (longer, stressed ones and shorter, unstressed ones). Musical meter thus has its roots in poetry.
Here is this ecosystem:
| Beat, pulse | The pulse is the temporal position of the beats, defined by a note value and the tempo |
| Measure | Regular cycle of strong and weak beats |
| Hypermeasure | 4- or 8-measure cycle containing a musical phrase |
