Meter

Meter is the regular recurring pattern of strong and weak beats of equal duration; also known as time. The meter or time signature in a musical composition is indicated by a fraction, and located at the beginning of a piece of music. The lower number of the fraction tells what kind of note receives one beat. The upper number tells how many beats are in a measure.
In Western music there are two types of meter, simple and compoud. In simple meter the upper number is either 2, 3, or 4. Each beat is subdivided by two In compound meter the upper number is either 6,9, or 12. Each beat is a dotted note and subdivided into groups of three beats.

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Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry, where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented (Scholes 1977). Hence it may also refer to the pattern of lines and accents in the verse of a hymn or ballad, for example, and so to the organization of music into regularly recurring measures or bars of stressed and unstressed "beats", indicated in Western music notation by a time signature, note-lengths and bar-lines.
The terminology of western music is notoriously imprecise in this area (Scholes 1977). MacPherson (1930, 3) preferred to speak of "time" and "rhythmic shape", Imogen Holst (1963, 17) of "measured rhythm". However, London has written a book on musical metre, which "involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time" (London 2004, 4).

This "perception" and "abstraction" of rhythmic measure is the foundation of human instinctive musical participation, as when we divide a series of identical clock-ticks into "tick-tock-tick-tock" (Scholes 1977). "Rhythms of recurrence" arise from the interaction of two levels of motion, the faster providing the pulse and the slower organizing the beats into repetitive groups (Yeston 1976, 50–52). "Once a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present" (Lester 1986, 77

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Brass instrument

A wind instrument, such as the French horn or the trombone, made of brass or other metal. Sound is produced through vibration of the lips and adjustment of the length of the sound tube by means of valves or a slide.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Brass instrument

A brass instrument is a musical instrument whose sound is produced by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones, literally meaning "lip-vibrated instruments".

There are two factors in producing different pitches on a brass instrument: One is alteration of the player's lip tension (or "embouchure"), and air flow. The second is the use of slides or valves to change the length of the tubing, thus changing the harmonic series presented by the instrument to the player.

The view of most scholars (see organology) is that the term "brass instrument" should be defined by the way the sound is made, as above, and not by whether the instrument is actually made of brass. Thus, as exceptional cases one finds brass instruments made of wood like the alphorn, the cornett, and the serpent, while some woodwind instruments are made of brass, like the saxophone.

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