What causes the prevalence of 4 beat rhythms?

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It seems like the human brain automatically sorts noises into patterns across 4 beats… But is this instead a cultural thing (nature vs. nurture)? For both answers: how and why did it develop in that way?

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15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I believe it’s because it’s so versatile. There are more combinations of melodies, etc with a 4-beat rhythm than with a 2 or 3 beat rhythm. Music is just math after all.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Here’s an excellent video by David Bennett that discusses this exact topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6zLP97wWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6zLP97wWA) Amusingly, a lot of the answers were sourced from Reddit, so I guess this closes the loop!

Basically, there’s two schools of thought: one that claims there’s some innate quality to 4/4 that makes it common, appealing or natural, and some that believe 4/4 is popular due to cultural or societal factors. The ‘humans are bipedal’ argument falls into the innate camp, whereas the cultural camp notes that more unusual time signatures can be quite common in non-Western cultures.

Naturally these answers are not mutually exclusive. It can be a little bit of nature, plus a little bit of culture. But it’s a really interesting topic!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Perhaps [this article] (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00366/full) provides the answer you seek.

Beats differ across culture. And people respond differently to different beats based on their background.

However, musical notation originates from classical music, which uses the western 4 beat notation. As such, 3 beat, 2 beat and other forms are often notated as a different version of 4 beats: [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(music))

There does seem a preference for 2 beat music over 3 beat music. [link] (https://www.livescience.com/51397-people-dance-to-same-beat-worldwide.html)

Anonymous 0 Comments

In my opinion, it’s largely cultural. 5/8, 7/8, and 5/4 time signatures are incredibly common in Greek and Armenian music, for example. Also, I think I encounter 6/8 time signatures *nearly* as often as 4/4, 3/4, or 2/4. It’s all over the place. So I guess I kind of disagree with the premise.

Anonymous 0 Comments

4/4 like patterns can be traced back to early African tribal rhythms which may point to some natural draw to them. However, 3/4 and 6/8 times were extremely prevalent in the heyday of waltzes (17th-19th centuries).

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

As with most things in music it’s very hard to tell what is a result of society and what is the result of nature. Many cultures have different approaches to rhythm. Some types of music don’t have a steady rhythmic beat. Balkan music has steady beat, but those beats have different lengths, some are short some are long. Our ideas about rhythm in the west come from Africa and Cuba (usually called afro-cuban) combined with traditional western European music.

Grouping 4 beats together isn’t universal, but it does provide a lot of benefits. Groups of 4 are symmetrical. Almost always 2 of those 4 beats will be emphasized, 1 and 3 for more European styles 2 + 4 for more afro cuban styles (I’m speaking like super duper generally here). Where as a group of 3 has 1 emphasized beat and 2 unemphasized. A group of 5 or 7 would also not be symmetrical. A big advantage of 4 is you can have a really steady rhythm that’s not as unbalanced as other groupings.

Personally I think that when you start combining multiple rhythms at the same time and making those rhythms fairly complex, like afro cuban music it is helpful to have a steady underlying beat. The actual rhythms are so complicated you want that steadiness of a symmetrical rhythm rather than one that that has a natural unbalance to it.

To your point your brain certainly does group noises into 4 beat patterns, but that’s because you’ve heard 4 beat patterns grouped together your entire life. How often have you heard anything different? If you grew up listening to music that didn’t primarily feature this type of rhythm would your brain still group 4’s together? I don’t know, but its hard to say definitively.