ABSTRACT
Syncopated rhythms deliberately work against the natural emphasis of a meter by emphasizing the beats and portions of beats that are ordinarily unaccented. Under bracket 1, the syncopation figure emphasizes beats 2 and 4; under bracket 2, it emphasizes the second eighth-note in beats 3 and 4; and under bracket 3, it emphasizes the second and fourth sixteenth-notes of beat 2. The most typical syncopation rhythm is the short-long-short pattern that is shown at three metric levels. Notice that the effect of the syncopation rhythm becomes more pronounced as the note values get shorter, which is why the readers have already encountered the rhythm under bracket 1 in earlier modules.
