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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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!
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.
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)
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