matra
Indian metrical beat
Matra is a unit of metrical time in Indian classical music and poetry, roughly equivalent to a beat or syllable count.
In Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, matras organize rhythmic cycles called talas, with each tala containing a fixed number of matras.
The term also appears in discussions of Sanskrit prosody, where it measures syllable weight—short syllables count as one matra, long syllables as two.
prosody
Unit of pronunciation
- moraProsodic duration unit
- stressPressure, mental or vocal
- intonationPitch variation in speech
- pitchFrequency of sound
tone · rhythm · cadence · prosody · quantity · duration · emphasis · accentuation
devanagari
Unobstructed speech sound
poetics
Metered poetic passage
- syllable countNumber of word segments
- prosodyStudy of verse rhythm
- rhythmPatterned stress and silence
- stanzaPoem's line grouping
syllable
Unit of pronunciation
- moraProsodic duration unit
- stressPressure, mental or vocal
- intonationPitch variation in speech
pitch · tone · rhythm · cadence · prosody · quantity · duration · emphasis · accentuation · articulation
vowel
Unobstructed speech sound
verse
Metered poetic passage
- syllable countNumber of word segments
- prosodyStudy of verse rhythm
- rhythmPatterned stress and silence
- Bengaliregional dialects, diacritics, diglossia
- Indian Musicraga, swara, ragas, sitar, tabla
- Indic linguisticsSanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi
- Sanskrit soundsvowels, consonants, varna, aspirates, nasals
- Tablatabla, dayan, tali, ta, ti
- scriptsalphabet, Latin alphabet, Roman alphabet, Greek alphabet, Hebrew alphabet