Re: hang --"going backwards in time; " "insane spring distance requested"

[Hans Aberg]

On 27 Nov 2007, at 19:06, Trevor Bača wrote:

> > If anybody has a good name for these meters, I would love to steal.
>
> n-ary meters? [...he offered, only half-jokingly...]
>
> Which would conflict with the senses of "binary" and "ternary"  
> meters referring to the (sub)divisions of the *numerators* of  
> meters, right? (6/8 and 9/8 are "ternary" in traditional score,  
> 2/4, 4/4 are "binary" ...)

There are in fact two traditions here: In the Germanic one (also used  
in Sweden), only time signature where the upper number is 2 (resp. 3)  
are called binary (resp. ternary). The English (or Latin) does  
something else like what you say.

And it is formally incorrect to call the upper number a "numerator",  
as a time signature written as
  m
  n
is defined as the note of duration 1/n taken m times.

  Hans Aberg