How can people tell things like the time signature, key, and BPM of a song just by listening to it?

Question

How can people tell things like the time signature, key, and BPM of a song just by listening to it?

In: 1

Answer 1

Because they’ve had formal music training where you learn how to do that stuff.

BPM is (relatively) easy to figure out if you can identify the beat and have a stopwatch, because it’s just counting. Time signature isn’t too hard either because songs generally emphasize the first beat of the measure (plus 99% of pop songs are in 4/4 anyways.) Key is a bit trickier but some people have an ear for it.