what is meter in music

In music, meter refers to regularly recurring patterns and accents such as bars and beats). It is the arrangement of rhythms in a repetitive pattern of strong and weak beats. The meter of a piece of music is indicated by a time signature, which shows the number of beats in a measure and the value of the basic beat. For example, 3/4 meter has three quarter-note beats per measure, and the time signature implies that an accent regularly occurs on the first beat of each measure. Meter is related to and distinguished from pulse, rhythm, and beats. Pulse is the regular, underlying beat that we feel in music, while rhythm is the organization of time in music, dividing up long spans of time into smaller, more easily comprehended units. Beats are the counted pulses within a metric context). Although most Western music has simple, repetitive patterns of beats, some music does not have a meter, such as ancient music like Gregorian chants, some experimental twentieth-century art music, and some Non-Western music.