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The Music of the Spheres. Shown in this engraving from Renaissance Italy are Apollo, the Muses, the planetary spheres and musical ratios.
Hemiola
from the wiki article:
In modern musical parlance, a hemiola is a metrical pattern in which two bars in simple triple time (3/2 or 3/4 for example) are articulated as if they were three bars in simple duple time (2/2 or 2/4).
The interplay of two groups of three notes with three groups of two notes gives a distinctive pattern of 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. This rhythm is common in Africa and known as African hemiola style.
The word hemiola derives from the Greek adjective ἡμιόλιος - hemiolios, meaning "one and a half". This term was used in a music-theoretic context by Aristoxenus. (The noun ἡμιολία - hemiolia "one and a half (fem.)" was also used by the Greeks to refer to a galley powered by one and a half banks of oars.) It was originally used in music to refer to the frequency ratio 3:2; that is, the interval of a justly tuned perfect fifth.
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