Most music, dance and oral poetry establishes and maintains an underlying "metric level", a basic unit of time that may be audible or implied, the pulse or tactus of the mensural level (Berry 1976/1986, 349; Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Fitch and Rosenfeld 2007, 44), or beat level, sometimes simply called the beat. This consists of a (repeating) series of identical yet distinct periodic short-duration stimuli perceived as points in time (Winold 1975, 213). The "beat" pulse is not necessarily the fastest or the slowest component of the rhythm but the one that is perceived as basic: it has a tempo to which listeners entrain as they tap their foot or dance to a piece of music (Handel 1989). It is currently most often designated as a crotchet or quarter note in western notation (seetime signature). Faster levels are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels (Winold 1975, 213). "Rhythms of recurrence" arise from the interaction of two levels of motion, the faster providing the pulse and the slower organizing the beats into repetitive groups (Yeston 1976, 50–52). "Once a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present" (Lester 1986, 77)
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