Recently I’ve been attending a lot of gym classes and the counts are always 4, 8, 16 etc. It made me wonder why music is set out this way and not in 5’s and 10’s like I would expect. Or am I missing something obvious?
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Even numbers are kinda the expectation in music, giving you a clean onbeat-offbeat-onbeat-offbeat tempo that keeps the whole thing nice and cyclical. Generally, any odd-beat tempo song is doing that on purpose for one reason or another- 3/4 time is known as “Waltz time” because the extra off beat lets dancers do a little flourish or something else interesting with the dance. One of the only songs I know in 5/4 time is, of all things [the mission impossible theme](https://youtu.be/XAYhNHhxN0A), though I’m not good enough at music theory to analyze how that helps the song capture the peculiar sound and vibe it does.
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