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?
In: 23
Meters with five beats in a measure are called [quintuple meter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintuple_meter#Examples_in_popular_music), and pretty much the only example I’ve ever found of a melody that’s in quintuple meter but is already familiar in popular music, is the [Mission Impossible theme song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGSUjuSBt1A).
I find that the easiest and most natural way to count out that rhythm is 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2. You can listen for yourself at that second link, try it out and see. But this count should make plain the core feature of e.g. 5/4 time: that it’s uneven, not just, like, literally, mathematically odd and not even, but also in terms of how to use that meter effectively in a piece of music.
In context, the uneven nature of 5/4 meter is a nice reflection of the starting and stopping of spies as they make a move, check their surroundings, make another move, recheck their surroundings, etc. In context, the music makes the action come to life. But the unevenness of a start and a stop isn’t necessarily useful in a gym context when the goal of the rhythm is **to help people keep time with each other**; evenness helps people keep in rhythm so that the class stays together.
There’s no reason why, when you’re working out alone, you can’t do exercises to whatever rhythm you choose.
Latest Answers