Okuzeka
Music vocabulary · Rhythm, Meter and Tempo

Beat

Meaning in music, with examples

/biːt/nounCore term

In music, beat means: The steady pulse that you tap your foot to in a piece of music. Beats are grouped into bars, and their speed is the tempo.

In Turkish: vuruş, zaman

How it is used

Teachers count beats aloud and talk about the first beat of the bar, strong and weak beats, or 'two beats per chord'. In pop and hip-hop, 'a beat' also means the instrumental track that a rapper or singer performs over.

Example sentences

  1. Each chord lasts for two beats, so the changes come quickly.

  2. He made the beat on his laptop and sent it to three different rappers.

Common collocations

  • on the beat
  • first beat of the bar
  • keep the beat
  • strong beat
  • make a beat
  • rhythmThe pattern of long and short sounds and silences in music, and how they are placed in time against the beat.
  • tempoThe speed of a piece of music, usually measured in beats per minute (BPM) or shown with Italian words such as allegro (fast) or adagio (slow).
  • barA short section of music that contains a fixed number of beats, shown on the page between two vertical lines called bar lines.
  • downbeatThe first and usually strongest beat of a bar. It also means the conductor's downward hand movement that starts the music.
  • BPMShort for beats per minute: the number of beats in one minute, used to measure tempo. A slow ballad might be around 70 BPM and a dance track around 125 BPM.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Rhythm, Meter and Tempo

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