In music, written notes indicate how long a particular sound is played. You have full notes, quarter notes, eighths, and so on. In juggling, the number represents how long it takes for an object to return to a hand (or, perhaps more eloquently, the amount of time it takes for a ball to be re-thrown.) Lots of jugglers will use a shorthand, saying that the number means how long an object is in the air – that is, the height of the throw. Though that’s technically incorrect (more on that in a future post – for now, you’ll have to be satisfied with this workshop handout (700kb, .pdf,)) we’ll be using the idea of number-value and height interchangeably in this article.

When you juggle a three ball cascade, all of the throws are siteswap 3. That means that every thrown ball returns to a hand after three beats. A beat is an arbitrary measure of time – every juggler has their own internal metronome. Though it’s usually considered best to have tall, slow patterns, if you get two jugglers to juggle three balls side by side, their patterns will almost invariably have slightly different tempos. My 3 might be different than your 3.

…Part of this is due to throw height, but the other part is due to something called dwell time – the refractory period where the ball is resting in your hand. If you’re juggling three balls in a cascade with a long dwell time or if you’re juggling three balls in a cascade with a short dwell time, the throws are all still the same… Imagine a metronome that marks time with a short click and an metronome that marks time with a longer tone – it’s kind of like that. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, and the more-complicated-than-we-need-to-get-here aspects of juggling math, check out Shannon’s Theorem.)

All that said, the big takeaway for our purposes is that you’ve got an internal metronome that clicks out beats.