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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Well it is far from universal. But music based off rhythm is most likely to come off our bipedal nature. We don’t count off fingers and toes but rather tend to dance to music and odd counts using two feet and two hands would be less natural (although lots of folk dances/songs are also in odd meter).
It is rather natural to go left-right, left-right etc which sort of naturally leads to 2 or 4 beats per measure and then multiply from there.
It would seem a bit unnatural (at first), if a dance count went left right left right left as the next step would not be a left (therefore starting the count) but a right step instead.
Even rhythmic clapping would be open clap open clap which again tends to favor even counts. Doing something like shouting “go go go” is usually “go, go, go” followed by a pause which gets back to a 4 count measure before it restarts.
It also could be conditioning.
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