Tempo (Italian: time) means the speed at which a piece of music is played. Sometimes the exact tempo is given at the beginning of a piece of music with the number of beats to a minute, as measured by a metronome. More often tempo indications give the performer more latitude, although the Hungarian composer Bel Bartk, for example, gives exact timings, often of each section of a work. In much earlier music the tempo is implicit in the notation or in the type of music.