VID: OH HOW WE WALTZ

I've always been fascinated with the 3/4 timing in music....Eliot Smith's Waltz #3, Mazzy Star Fade into You, Joe Cocker's A Little Help From My Friends, Badly Drawn Boy Once Around the Block, even Billy Joel's Piano Man (all below). Leonard Cohen does rightful waltz tribute in the venerable Take This Waltz.

There are many many many more...these are great songs! What's up with the waltz beat?

A waltz beat has a very specific rhythm...a BUM da da BUM da da that my body seems to like. Rhythm, the relationship of the length of one note to another, is crucial to what turns sound into music. Rhythm is also the facet of music you feel most in your bones, the bass tones of rhythm in music are often very low, and therefore have very long and stretched out soundwaves that reach people from further away. We hear more of the bass beat from a medium distance than we do melody. (This is why you hear the beat of your neighbors stereo before you hear the melody of their always untasteful music.) Do we hear more rhythm more often since it carries further through the air and thus our body grabs onto it? Or have we evolved to love it because it mimics our own heartbeat or the pace of our feet while walking?