Formula for length of a measure in minutes?
This question is probably a crossover with mathematics.
I'm charting a song into a music game. The song has numerous #/12 time signatures, but the game can only handle power-of-2 signatures (#/4, #/8, etc).
As a workaround, I'm trying to use #/16 and increase the BPM so it takes the same time as if it was in #/12. However I can't figure out how much faster.
What is the formula for how much time a measure takes, given the BPM & time signature?
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You can figure something like this out. By definition the lower number indicates the type of note that gets ONE beat. I prefer to keep it as a fraction. So common time, 4/4 is the same as 4 quarter notes, 4*(1/4). We have 8th and 16th but we do not have 1/12 notes in standard music notation, unless it's something new. So I am not even sure I can directly answer your question. But I will provide a formula for the other time signatures that make sense to me. If you have the BPM (beats/min) and you know the time signature as N/M then each 1/M note gets ONE beat. In 3/2 time, with a tempo of 120 bpm, each 1/2 note gets 1 beat and a measure in 3/4 would be 3 of these. If one note is one beat then the time for a single beat is 1/120 minutes, or a 1/2 second and a single measure of 3/2 is 3/2 seconds long.
So all you really need is N/BPM. The value of the note does not come into play. You would read this as there are N M-th notes in a measure, each M-th note gets a beat at tempo BPM, hence the measure is N/BPM units of time long.
It is: BPM divided by top number of time signature = number of bars per minute. As long as the BPM corresponds to the bottom number of the time signature you don’t need it. If the BPM corresponds to a group of notes, say 3 notes in 9/8 then divide by the number of groups per measure, in the case of 9/8 it’s 3.
60 seconds divided by number of bars per minute = seconds per measure.
Example 1: 120 BPM 4/4 time
120/4 = 30 measures per minute; 60/30 = 2 seconds per measure
Example 2: 200 BPM 6/8 time
200/6 = 33.33 measures per minute; 60/33.33 = 1.8 seconds per measure
Example 3: 140 BPM 9/8 time, dotted 1/4 = 140 BPM
140/3 = 46.67 measures per minute; 60/46.67 = 1.28 seconds per measure
Please correct me if I’m wrong, I USED to be decent at math years ago.
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