By song, we mean text that is performed with contraints on the pitch patterns that imply a melody as well as structured in time. We avoid going directly into music here, but consider only very simple songs.

France (recorded in USA). Rhythm should be easy to hear when people are singing very simple songs -- like Frere Jacques as sung by American children in awful French:

Fre-re Jacqu-es, Fre-re Jacqu-es
Dor-mez vous? [rest], dor-mez vous? [rest]....

CLIP

Please try to tap your finger on the table in time with almost every syllable onset. You will find that your tapping is highly regular.

Notice that your taps naturally occur near the onsets of the syllables. This is a very important (and universal) observation. We call these lineup points `BEATS'. In the first line, you could tap on each syllable - that is, on:

FRE, -RE, JAC, -QUES, FRE, -RE, JAC, -QUES

or you could tap on every other syllable - that is, on:

FRE-re, JAC-ques, FRE-re, JAC-ques, etc.

Each line here has 8 beats but 4 strong beats.

African. Another song using a pentatonic scale. Singing with a drum.

Continue for more example of song-like performances.