Why (Occidental) conventional rhythm notation became conventional?
Human languages evolve and adapt themselves to the needs (phonetics, auditory, contextual) of the users. To what extent has been showed that Occidental music notation followed that path?
Is it just a matter of chance that we note music as we do?
Are reciprocals of powers of two dominant because it's easier for a performer to divide a length into a half, than into (say) a fifth? Or does it have to do with the way they get arranged in a listener's mind?
We may group notes hierarchically for perceptual reasons, but do these reasons come from the visual skills of the interpreter, or from the cortical organization that listens to it?
Are there neuroscientific evidences that our music notation has fitted to the way we play or perceive?
Update (for the sake of clarification): we know how well-founded it is pitch notation in the way we perceive it, even its grounding in physics is understood. Same thing here, why do we note rhythm as we do?
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Is it just a matter of chance that we note music as we do?
One of the ideas put forward by A generative theory of tonal music is that "the events of a piece are related to a regular alternation of strong and weak beats at a number of hierarchical levels" - I believe the suggestion is that this is something fundamental to the human experience of music, though to my shame having seen it referenced so much I don't even recall if I've read the book itself or not! I'd be interested to know if these ideas were put forward as such earlier. In any case, standard rhythm notation relates well to the idea of a hierarchical metric structure.
Are reciprocals of powers of two dominant because it's easier for a
performer to divide a length into a half, than into (say) a fifth? Or
does it have to do with the way they get arranged in a listener's
mind?
I believe that standard rhythm notation deals pretty well with threes as well as twos. I suspect that twos and threes (and fours) are in some senses the groups we tend to see as most straightforwardly 'musical', at least in the Occident...
We may group notes hierarchically for perceptual reasons, but do these
reasons come from the visual skills of the interpreter, or from the
cortical organization that listens to it?
I'm sure that there's plenty of evidence that seeing/reading hierarchical structures is helpful - if we agree that we 'hear' hierarchically too, then the answer would be 'both' (if I understand the question).
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