The steady underlying pulse of music — what you tap your foot to.
The beat is the steady, recurring pulse that underlies a piece of music — the regular throb you instinctively tap your foot or nod your head to. It is the basic unit of musical time, and tempo (in BPM) simply measures how many beats pass per minute. Beats are usually grouped into bars, with certain beats feeling stronger than others, which creates the sense of metre. In everyday language 'a beat' can also mean an entire instrumental backing track, especially in hip-hop and electronic music, where producers 'make beats' — but at its core the beat is the heartbeat that everything else in the music is measured against.
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