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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5 and 10 are normal to us for numbers only because of the decimal system we use to count. And probably because you happen to have 5 fingers etc.
4 or 8 “feels” right to us. It’s much more natural to try and tap out, dance to or walk to. If you just take walking as an example we have two feet so an even beat is significantly more natural to us than an uneven one like 5.
There are absolutely reasons to use unusual time signatures like 5/4, 5/18, 13/8, 7/8 etc. You’re just very unlikely to find them in any generic song as they aren’t as easy to follow.
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