What is the difference between beat and rhythm? What is an example of both in music?
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Music is broken down into beats per measure (a measure is basically a short segment of music) and different pieces of music have different numbers of beats per measure. Although the number of beats per measure can change within a piece of music, for explanations’ sake, let’s assume that the entire song has four beats per measure for the entire piece. Beats in this song will always the same no matter what the tune or rhythm is. When a crowd claps their hands along to a piece of bouncy music, they are clapping along with the beat (either every beat or every other beat).
Rhythm is how many notes you play per beat, and how you vary your note lengths. So you could play one note evenly per beat (dum dum dum dum), or you could play two notes for some beats, where those two notes have to take up the same amount of time as one regular beat, so they are twice as fast (dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum), or you could play one note for every two beats, so each note would have to be twice as slow as a regular beat (duum duum), and so on and so forth for increasingly complex rhythms. In each of these examples, you are playing four beats, but each is a different rhythm with a different number of notes per beat.
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