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Beats per minute - Definition and Overview |
| Related Words: Absolute, Accurate, Baby, Balance, Bantam, Bell, Book, Breath, Breathing, Calendar, Capitalize |
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Beats per minute (bpm) is a unit typically used as either a measure of tempo in music, or a measure of one's heart rate. A rate of 60 bpm means that one beat will occur every second. One bpm is equal to 1/60 Hz.
Beats per minute became common terminology in popular music during the disco era because of its usefulness to DJs, and remain important in dance music.
Hip-hop uses a BPM tempo of 90-120, while house music is faster: 110 -140BPM. Jungle music goes even faster: 140-190, while Gabba tops it with above-200 BPM.
Beatmixing, an art amongst DJs, concerns the speeding up or down of a record in order to match the BPM of a previous track so both can be flawlessly mixed.
Normally, the pitch and BPM of a track are linked: spin a disc 10% faster and both pitch and tempo will be 10% higher. Software to change the pitch without changing the tempo, or vice-versa, is called time-stretching or pitch-shifting software. It works OK for small adjustments (+- 20%), but the result can be noisy and unmusical for larger changes.
BPM can be calculated by hand (count the number of downbeats/bass drums per 60 seconds, or - to be fast - per 15 seconds and multiply by 4), but some softwares like MixMeister (http://www.mixmeister.com), Traktor-DJ (http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?traktormixer_us) and PC-DJ (http://www.pcdj.com/Products/RedBlueVRM.asp) can do it automatically.
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Example Usage of minute |
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nessanovkova: be back in a minute |
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technocabaret: Ahhh ftsk was great on the half time show :) it was like 1 minute long but so made my day! |
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KnicksBball42: How much you wanna bet the lads will call any minute? They always do... |
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