Cadence
Etymology
From Latin "cadere," "to fall," through Italian "cadenza" and Old French "cadence." The core image is a falling: the drop of the voice at a phrase’s end, the settling of a melody. In music it named the specific chord progressions that bring a passage to a close; in prose it broadened to the overall flow of rhythm.
noun · /KAY-dnss/
The rhythmic rise and fall of sound, or the chord sequence that closes a musical phrase.
What it names
The felt shape of a sentence’s or melody’s ending — the way speech settles into a rhythm or music resolves toward rest — giving you a word for the pattern of movement in sound.
Example
You could recognize her prose blind by its cadence — those long, looping clauses that always land softly on a single short word.
Related idea
Cadence is the shape and flow of the rhythm; meter is the strict, countable pattern of stressed and unstressed beats underneath it.