Bob Dubery wrote:
Because that's a scheme that the human brain can handle easily and naturally.
Well that's my guess.
I don't believe that musical conventions like this are arbitrary. I believe they came about because of the way that the brain works.
Though there might be a large amount of "nurture" rather than "nature" in all of this. Where you come from and the environment you're raised in might effect things. After all, Indian music doesn't sound funny to Indian people, but people like me, WASP, born in England in the late 50s, have to make some mental jumps to listen to that stuff. So maybe 4 to the bar is conditioning.
Joe Boyd wrote about a different culture where they are used to different kinds of rhythm. This is from an article he wrote about his explorations of Bulgarian music....
"I thought back to childhood summer evenings in Princeton, New Jersey, when the Folk Dance Society would meet in a park near our house. Those circles were filled made up of young men with pocket guards and slide rules and girls with glasses, long corduroy skirts and sandals. When a tricky 5/4 or 9/4 rhythm came on the record player, you could see them counting under their breath as they tried to avoid tripping over their own feet or their partner's. Even at a young age, I could sense that this was the least sexy thing imaginable.
But that first night in Koprivshtitsa I saw girls' hips swaying easily to the complicated rhythms - no counting under the breath here - and the eye contact that passed back and forth as the men gripped their waists and flung them forward and back across their bodies seemed to indicate that was not, in fact, an unsexy phenomenon. "
