Timing in Solfa Notation: an important part of music

Timing in Solfa Notation 

The solfa notation (tonic solfa), like the staff notation, is read by observing time. Timing in solfa notation helps the reader to understand the beat of the song and how to place every note in relation to the time beat.

Whenever music is playing, usually you may find youself moving a part of your body along with the rhythm. You may not be dancing; you are probably tapping on something in a consistent time. You could even be nodding. When you do that, you follow the timing of the song.

Every song has a time signature which tells how the beat is to be counted. In staff notation, it is written in figures (like ¾, 4/4, etc) at the beginning of the staff after the clef and key signature. In solfa notion, the time signature is not written. It is read by the bars and the division within the bars. It is quite easy to discover than it is on the staff, which is why it is written on the staff but not on the solfa notation. There are three types of timing: simple timing compound timing and complex timing.
The simple and compound timings are common but the compound is very uncommon. For this learning stage, we will leave out the compound timing in our discussions.

Simple timing (simple time signature in staff notation) 

In simple timing, one bar measure can be divided into two equal parts which can be further divided into single beats. It has even divisibility. This is the simplest timing to follow, so when a song is said to be simple, it’s mostly written in simple time timing. There are four beats in a bar; i.e. the space between the two long vertical lines as shown below.

The beginning of a solfa notation is a bar line. The timing can be determined between the first two bar lines. Examine the solfas bellow.


There are four beats between the bars. The four beats are divided into two – two beats on the left, and two beats on the right. Each pair of beats is further divided into two by the colon (:) symbol, which is used to mark single beat.  The note that comes before the colon is a full beat note. All the notes on the solfa notation above have single full beats. To read the time in the above, we will say 1,2,3,4 for the notes between the first and second bar lines. The same is done for all notes within each pair of bars.

Figure 2 above shows how each of the beats in figure one can be divided into two halves using dots (.). The dot is used to indicate that the note before it would be read as half beat. Therefore one beat contains two notes. The notes are the letters that represent the sounds. Each of the halve beat can be further divided into two to have quarter beats.

Compound timing 

While simple timing allows division of a beat into two, compound timing allows division of a beat into three. There are three notes between the bars this time around, not two; and the timing is 1, 2, 3. So when you tap along with a song, you will be producing multiple threes.
m : m : m  | s : s: s  | d : t : l  | s : - : -