Is This Anything?
As Letterman would say, is this anything? Following is a simple visual aid -- or maybe not an aid; maybe a hinderance -- that I realized I was seeing in my mind's myopic eyeball while I was singing My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean. It's pretty simplistic, but I found it odd to picture the 3/4 time signature in such a way. I have talked to other people who have pictures in their minds of such things as the calendar year, or the days of the week. When I was a kid I always pictured the year as a sort of hoop, lying flat, with Christmas in the foreground and the summer months in the background. Wednesday always looked like the number "5" to me; I have no idea why.
The strange part of this 3/4 time visualization is that in the "1,2,3" of any given measure, the "1" beat has the same width as the "2" and "3" beats, but the 2 and 3 are stacked one over the other. So moving along horizontally from left to right, you actually spend twice as long in the "2,3" columns as in the "1" columns. But on the other hand, you do spend equal amounts of time per rectangle. Anyway, is this anything? Do you visualize normally non-visual things in weird ways like this? Or is it just my medication?
Read these 8 lines like the lines on a page, from left to right. The squares with the numbers are just rests. When you get to the end, follow the arrow back to square one and do it all over again.
