Hi Silvain, > I wonder about the term “irrational” meter. Should not we say “irregular” ?? > as in mathematics, an irrational number is a number which cannot be > represented as a fraction...
As both a published composer *and* a published number theorist, I wholeheartedly concur with your intuition — I’ve been pushing for decades against “irrational” as a descriptor for time signatures [except where it actually applies, of course, as in π/4]. “Irregular” is better… but ultimately I prefer “non-dyadic” to describe any time signature where the bottom number (a.k.a. “denominator”, a label I also avoid) is not an integer power of 2. Cheers, Kieren.
