A tatum is a feature of music that has been variously defined as: "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase",
"the shortest durational value
..in music that
sstill more than incidentally encountered", "the smallest cognitively meaningful subdivision of the main beat",
and "the fastest pulse present in a piece of music".
"In Western
notation
In linguistics and semiotics, a notation is a system of graphics or symbols, characters and abbreviated expressions, used (for example) in artistic and scientific disciplines to represent technical facts and quantities by convention. Therefore, ...
, tatums may correspond typically to
sixteenth- or twenty-fourth-notes",
or
thirty-second note
In music, a thirty-second note (American) or demisemiquaver (British) is a Musical note, note played for of the duration of a whole note (or ''semibreve''). It lasts half as long as a sixteenth note (or ''semiquaver'') and twice as long as ...
s.
More technically, a tatum is the "lowest regular
pulse
In medicine, a pulse represents the tactile arterial palpation of the cardiac cycle (heartbeat) by trained fingertips. The pulse may be palpated in any place that allows an artery to be compressed near the surface of the body, such as at the nec ...
train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events: a time quantum. It is roughly equivalent to the time division that most highly coincides with note onsets". The tatum allows a musician's deviation from an ensemble's tempo (which may be implied or explicitly played) to be quantified: mathematically, "a deviation function determines the amount of time that an event metrically falling on a particular tatum should be shifted when performed".
The existence of the tatum allowed human perception of music to be more closely modelled by algorithms.
This was important in the development of software for
Echo Nest, which underlies several music streaming services.
The term was coined by Jeff Bilmes in an
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
Master's thesis, ''Timing Is of the Essence'', published in 1993, and is named after the influential
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
pianist
Art Tatum
Arthur Tatum Jr. (, October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist who is widely regarded as one of the greatest in his field. From early in his career, Tatum's technical ability was regarded by fellow musicians as extraord ...
, "whose tatum was faster than all others".
Notes
Rhythm and meter
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