I didn't say that. I said that accent is not meter necessarily.KoolFartWind wrote:You are right, you cannot map injectively from a time signature to a meter,
You have two different statements here.
1)
2)for every given meter (a periodic "wave"of accentuations) you have only one possible time signature. So the term "meter" describes the phenomenon more specifically.
I actually deleted a statement of mine above as I thought it too obvious: Time signature is a statement of the meter.meter to me is still the periodic accentuation function.
But I have shown rather beyond question that accentuation does not through itself determine meter; not even 1, 1 could be relatively lacking accent and we still state the meter if there is still meaning in it. For instance there are Indian tala that show an 'empty beat' or Khali on '1' as counted and 'SOM' (sum) only occurs after a later iteration; we could do that in meter here as well.
You have all of this lingo that suggests to me you are working top-down rather than through [experience with] the thing itself. You are confounding accentuation with meter in the first statement.
Take one of my concrete examples. 6 can by accent be 3 + 3, it can be 2 + 2 + 2, it can be 4 + 2.
Those are possible meters through accent, yes, but they can all be stated as 6 and perhaps they should. The "America" type of hemiola has the first two alternating.
There is African rhythm where the cycle is 12: at one level it's 7 + 5, but other parts deal with it in terms of 3 and there is a 4x3 vs 3x4 there. To state 'the meter is 12' is the most meaningful.
Defining meter as accentuation is a mistake, then.
Meter at the end of the day is just 'how many'; 'time signature' is not more than a statement of how many [12] of these [8ths] durational values .
