Tempo and time signature
Central to the concept of musical time are tempo and time signature. The first of these couldn’t be more straightforward: tempo is simply speed, expressed as a number of beats per minute (BPM). While it might be easy to understand, though, the tempo of a track plays a huge part in defining its feel and character, and even placing it in a particular genre or subgenre: dubstep at 140bpm vs drum & bass at 170bpm vs 2-step at 130bpm, for example. We’ll come back to tempo shortly, but time signature warrants more of an explanation…
About time