Ensayos

RHYTHM

Authors: Yohana FreitasLuis Freitas
Victor RonMaracay, June 2012

RHYTHM

Rhythm is a movement or variation characterized by the regular recurrence or alternation of different quantities or conditions.Rhythm is made up of sounds and silences. These sound and silences are put together to form a pattern of sounds which are repeated to create a rhythm. A rhythm has a steady beat, but it may also havedifferent kinds of beats. Some beats may be stronger, longer, shorter or softer than others.
For example, in music, the rhythm is usually produced by making certain notes in a sequence stand out fromothers by being louder or longer or higher. In a single piece of music, a composer can use many different rhythms. In speech, we find that syllables take the place of musical notes or beats, manylanguages the stressed syllables determine the rhythm.
In most languages, the more syllables there are, the longer it takes to say something, which makes sense in a proper way. In English, 30% of the spokenlanguage uses an uh- short sound which will make “sounds” shorter. This is the shwa sound and as speakers do, they usually “swallow up” sounds to put the stress emphasis on the words that matter. InEnglish, the amount of time it takes to say something does not depend on the number of syllables. For example: Dogs chase cats, the dogs chase cats, the dogs chase the cats, the dogs will chase thecats. The time used for saying the shorter version is only a third of the longer one.
Language rhythm is the language with specific rhythmical patterns of speech rhythms. Speech as well as all bodily...