Baroque
Active Member
Problem is, someone out there may not find that monotonous, while thry find something even simpler to be the threshold for monotony. Someone may argue, how many measures does something need to repeat in order to officially qualify as repetitive. It may repeat, but how much exactly must it do so to qualify for that descriptor on a technical plane. They have BPM, meter, or Adagio markings, but someone may consider 4/4 fast, while another finds it the slowest thing since retarded tortoises. Although you may be right on speed, as it has actual numerical quantifications. Nonetheless, speed, or descriptors like "fast" or "slow" are already opinions and subjectively loaded from the beginning. Someone may regard Mach 2 as slow, but Mach 13 as fast, or Mach 1 as fast and the speed of sound as slow.
Fast and slow may be subjective in relativistic physics but in music we give fast and slow definite numbers as you said, certain beats per minute over time are labeled as fast or slow.
My definition of monotonous is quantifiable, a piece that uses only scale degrees (which we can represent with numbers) from a single key, or only chord changes based on that key. or you can use the definition of a drone. amount of time droned per minute
My definition of repetitive is also quantifiable. Simply count the number of repeats in a piece and count the number of repeats in another piece. The piece which has more repeats is more repetitive than the other. We can assign each piece its number of repeats as its level of repetitiveness. or you could find repeats per minute or repeats per beat
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