What is tempo?
It's beats per minute, but what is a beat?
The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live.
The song's tempo ranges between 70 and 90 beats per minute over the course of the tune, with noticeable speeding up at the end.
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