What the Italian tempo words mean (in BPM)

Before numbers, scores used words. Beethoven was the first major composer to publish exact metronome marks — he added them to his symphonies in 1817, two years after Johann Maelzel patented the wind-up metronome. The words still bracket familiar speeds. Tap one to set it:

Ranges follow the conventions in most modern editions; older scores vary, and Beethoven's own marks are famously brisk — a debate that still runs among conductors.

How many BPM is each genre?

"What tempo is house?" has a real answer because dance music is built on a grid. These are the tempos producers actually quantise to — a quick reference when you need to match a track or set a practice speed:

The runner's trick: a metronome for cadence

Runners use a metronome to fix cadence — steps per minute. Coach Jack Daniels counted the strides of distance runners at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and found almost all of them turning over at around 180 steps a minute or more. Raising a low cadence toward that range tends to shorten over-striding and lighten the impact through each step.

Set the metronome to 180, put one earbud in, and land one foot on each click. 180 is the headline figure, not a law — your efficient cadence depends on height and pace — but it is a sound place to start, which is why "metronome for running" is a search in its own right.

Why drummers need a metronome they can see

A kit is loud — often over 100 dB at the throne — so a clicking metronome simply vanishes underneath it. Drummers solve this two ways: a loud click piped into closed headphones (a "click track"), or a visual beat. This tool does the visual version: switch on Flash the panel on every beat and the whole panel pulses, brightest on the downbeat, so you can lock to it with the click muted entirely. It is the same idea behind wearable metronomes that buzz the beat against your wrist.

Why most browser metronomes drift — and this one doesn't

The obvious way to build a metronome is a setInterval that plays a click every beat. It sounds fine for a few bars, then wanders: JavaScript timers are throttled and jittery, and the error accumulates. The fix, set out in Chris Wilson's well-known write-up A Tale of Two Clocks, is to use two clocks — a coarse timer that wakes up often and looks ahead, scheduling each click on the Web Audio clock, which is sample-accurate. That is what runs here: clicks are scheduled ~120 ms in advance on the audio timeline, and a separate animation loop reads the same schedule to drive the flashing dots, so sound and visuals stay locked even on a busy phone. When the app goes to the background, it quietly banks a full second of clicks ahead so the beat never stumbles.

Sources

• Johann Maelzel, British patent for the wind-up metronome, 1815; the double-weighted pendulum was earlier devised by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (c. 1814).
• Beethoven's published metronome marks, added to his symphonies in 1817.
• Jack Daniels, stride-rate observations of elite runners, 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (popularised the ~180 cadence figure).
• Chris Wilson, "A Tale of Two Clocks — Scheduling Web Audio with Precision" (Web Audio scheduling technique).

Related tools & pages

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