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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Really, you can count the pulse or beat of music however you want. Time signatures like 3 beats to a measure, or 4 beats to a measure, are constructs that are specific to different styles of music and cultures. These subdivisions can help musicians and dancers by emphasizing the repeating patterns in the music – so like, a certain piece might have a repeating pulse every 3 beats, so you might represent that piece as “in 3” and count three beats to a measure – but that isn’t really integral to the music, you can count it however you want. Music outside the western notational tradition can group pulses very differently. Indian music uses a tala that is much longer than a western measure and has subdivisions, but not necessarily the same length. So they might be counting in 14 (4+3+4+3) or 7 (3+2+2). Other systems have asymmetric pulses – for example some Balkan dances have a quick-quick-slow-quick-quick repeating meter: five repeating beats but the middle one is longer.
Probably the reason the counts are usually in 4 at your gym classes though, is that a lot of western music is in 4
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