It seems like most music I’ve heard is in 4/4. There’s some in 3/4, and a few in 2/2, and even 6/8. That makes some sense to me. It’s easy to divide into half repeatedly to get half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes. It’s familiar.
But with computers handling the work, I’m just curious what other times might sound like, say something weird like 7/13, or 5/9? Has anyone ever tried this sort of thing? Or would there not be any real difference? Thanks!
First of all, the second number needs to be a power of 2… they’re named after the size of notes, which are whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, etc.
Second, Yes has done a bunch of stuff in odd rhythms. Either Drama or 90125 has some stuff in alternating 5/8-7/8 time.
Then there’s Take 5, which is in 5/4 time.
The biggest problem with rock music being in odd times is that you have to be able to play it drunk, stoned, and exhausted. Or so I’ve heard.
There’s a Sunny Day Real Estate song off their “LP2” record called “5/4” which is (ta-dah!) in 5/4 time. Really interesting. Also, check out Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” for a really interesting mix of time signatures. It’s all over the place, back and forth, for a great deal of time.
I know of at least 4/4 and 7/8 being in it and I know there’s at least one more. (Thanks to my brilliant girlfriend’s musical mind.)
Huh. The Grateful Dead played “The Eleven” (which is in eleven) for YEARS at shows where they were all fulla acid. Except for Pig Pen, who was drunk.
Electronics make altered musical tones easier to reproduce accurately, which is even more interesting than playing with time. Try Easley Blackwood’s MICROTONAL ETUDES.
The second movement of Tchicovsky’s Pathatic symphony is in 5/8 (or is it 5/4) time with the effect of a broken waltz with a missing beat. I doubt this is the earliest example but I beleive it is one of the earliest of an odd time signiture. There is a lot of modern music with odd time or no time signiture. Charles Ives wrote a lot of his piano music without any (although time is implied), same with Erik Satie.
Nick Drake wrote at least one song in 7/8 (I forget which one). And lets not forget about Dave Brubeck and all of his experiments.
They’re hard to play, but IMHO, the real barrier is that they’re hard to listen to. You can play just about anything in 4/4 or 6/8 time and it sounds “normal”, as soon as you slip into 5’s or 7’s, it sounds odd to most. You either have to playing to ears that can hear it (jazz fans), or be a good writer. There’s a higher threshold of “listenability” with odd time signatures.
As mentioned, the 2nd number must be a power of 2. The first number should be a prime, or else you’re really not much different than a smaller number (14/16 isn’t much different than 7/8).
But there are plenty and plenty and plenty of examples of both. Loads of jazz involves odd time signatures, see Dave Brubeck as already mentioned.
In the rock world, here are a few off the top of my head…
5’s:
Steely Dan, the end of Kings
Jethro Tull, Living in the Past (my favorite example)
7’s:
The end of Rush’s Tom Sawyer
Pink Floyd, Money
Kinda the end of the chorus in The Weight, by the Band (really just a dropped beat)
11’s:
The main riff in Allman Brother’s Whipping Post (Though you could call it 3 measures of 3/4 with a 2/4 at the end)
Yes & Rush did lots of stuff with odd time signatures. So did King Crimson, Frank Zappa, and just about anyone who is considered “art rock”.
In Western music, the first weird time signature ever to appear was AFAIK the second movement in Aleksandr Borodin’s Symphony #2 in B Minor, ca. 1875. There’s an anecdote that the fiddlers, seeing a 5/8 signature for the first time in their lives, were baffled by it. So the conductor solved their rhythm problems by just having them chant “Rim-sky Kor-sa-kov, Rim-sky Kor-sa-kov” until they got the hang of it.
The first well-known instance of a 5/4 signature was the third movement in Chaikovskii’s Symphony #5, the “Pathétique” (1893).
All kinds of weird time signatures (and rapid shifts of meter from one bar to another) flourished in 20th century music. Charles Ives even composed many pieces (like the Concord Sonata with no bars or meters at all!
Sorry for my spelling. 
How did the weird time signatures get infiltrated into Western music in the first place? The conservatory experiments of Borodin and Chaikovskii in the 19th century didn’t really catch on. The real rhythmic innovation came from traditional peasant folk music of the Balkans, where these meters had flourished since time immemorial.
To one man must go the credit of attuning our ears and bodies to the new rhythms: Béla Bartók. He traveled all over the villages and farms of Hungary, Slovakia, and Transylvania, staying in mud huts, stepping in cow poop, recording old-time folk music from the villagers who at the beginning of the 20th century still had not been reached by modernity. Bartók transcribed the peasant songs and dances, using them to build his own compositions infused with their primitivistic vitality and verve.
The southern Balkans, especially Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thracian Greece, are where all kinds of meters like 7/8, 5/8, 9/8, 13/8, etc. were common in the folk music. Bartók composed “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” as the final pieces in his graded piano course Mikrokosmos, for the pianist to show off his musical mastery by pounding out these complex time signatures. (Bartók also threw some jazz riffs into the mix for fun.) After Bartók, an ability o handle complex meters became a required skill for the 20th-century musician.
I think the best known example is the theme to the television show Mission: Impossible, which is in 5/4.
I think 4/4 is just so ingrained on most of todays music writers that they literally think in 4/4. Most of the modern 3/4 stuff comes from country. I don’t think I have ever heard a rap or punk song in 3/4. The way a musical phrase plays over 8 or 12 bars has just been ground into peoples head. So to write in 5/4 you have 12 extra beats to worry about.
Just my museings.
Zebra
On every album by Frank Zappa you can hear complex meters and rapid, unpredictable shifts of time signature. Frank taught himself composition as a kid by listening to twentieth-century masters like Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen, so complex rhythms were second nature for him. I read an interview with him around the time of Sheik Yerbouti (1979), in which he mocked the disco craze, and he was asked about the dancers that appeared on stage with him – how were they able to dance to such tricky music? Zappa answered that anybody can dance to any music, whatever the rhythm, you just feel it in you body and go with it. The extremely monotonous thump-thump-thump of disco was only for people who thought they needed it as a crutch to dance to.
now, let’s not forget Kansas’ “Point of Know Return”—that little organ line is in 7, i think.
but let kansas, rush, genesis, yes, king crimson and the other prog-rockers be damned… the reigning (though retired) kings of LISTENABLE odd time signatures are undoubtedly Soundgarden, who recorded maybe two songs on “Superunknown” that did not involve some sort of metric weirdness.
soundgarden stand out because their time signatures are more than listenable—they are memorable and they rock (as opposed to being the sort of thing only of interest to those who enjoy memorizing numbers). they have a very “organic” sound, as opposed to, say, the very confusing rhythmic stutters of “Roundabout.”
I’d cite “My Wave” (5-4), “Fell on Black Days” (4-4 plus 1/2 a measure), “Spoonman” (7/4 or 7/8, i really don’t know how to tell the difference on the second number) and “Black Hole Sun” (i think it has an 11-beat guitar-freakout break). Then, of course, there’s the Big Daddy of them all, “The Day I Tried to Live,” which is still incomprehensible to me (i think the time signature changes every other measure in that one, yet the riff doesn’t sound wanky or disjointed at all).
In addition to odd asymmetric sigs like 5/4, 7/4, and so forth, there are time sigs used in heavily syncopated music. You don’t see it written that way too often, since just as in fourth grade arithmetic you can reduce the fractions. For unknown reasons, 6/8 is considered legitimate but 8/8 is usually written 4/4 (even though you have to count in 8 to map out the rhythm); 12/8 can be written as 4/4 or 3/4 (but you end up counting 12 in your head if the actual rhythm is bouncing back and forth between 3s and 2s).
Most common 8/8 syncho=1…4…7., [3+3+2/8]
I’ve written in 12/8 a couple of times:
1…4…7.9.11., [3+3+2+2+2]
and here is one (in MIDI format) I composed that shifts in mid-stream from
3/4 time to 18/8 as
1…4…7…10…13.15.17., [3+3+3+3+2+2+2]
(you’ll know when! 
)
Some more famous examples of unusual time signatures:
Alternating 6/8 and 3/4 (12/8?)
“America” from West Side story (“I want to be in A/mer-i-ca//OK by me in A/merica//Everything free in A/merica”…)
In 7/8 time (mixed 2/4 and 3/8):
“Heaven on their Minds” (chorus) from Jesus Christ Superstar (“Nazareth your/famous son//Should have stayed a/great unknown//Like his father/carving wood” … “Tables chairs and/oaken chests//Would have suited/Jesus best…”)
I hope I got the lyrics right.
These are my favorite parts of these musicals, because of the unusual meters.
As far as “rock” songs in other than 4/4, how about the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” (6/8).
Was Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” in some weird time signature? It sounds like a waltz, but somehow weirder . . .
This rhythm came from Africa and was introduced to the Western world through Latin American music early in the 20th century. (Although Louis Moreau Gottschalk had been writing Afro-Creole rhythms from New Orleans into his compositions way back in the 1850s.) Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge.” It was one of the main tango rhythms and also appeared in slowed-down form as the habañera (Scott Joplin’s “Solace”). Béla Bartók speeded it up and used it as the maniacally driving rhythm in one of his most flamboyant piano pieces, the last of the “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” (whether this African rhythm really occurred in Bulgaria, or if BB was just winkig at the audience, I don’t know).
This is another Latino rhythm that caught on early in the 20th century. One example that may even be familiar to Anglos is Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story:
I like to be in A-me-ri-ca…
This rhythm exploits the shifting accents that allow 3/4 to mesh with 6/8. The example you gave is the same as a bar of 6/8 followed by a bar of 3/4.
Ravel’s pizzicato 2nd movement in his String Quartet was the first real polyrhythm achieved by a European: he played off a melody in 3/4 against a rhythm section in 6/8, giving rise to a whole new type of syncopation (of course, Africans had been playing much more complex polyrhythms than this for centuries).
I found a site about odd time sigs. Some of the examples already mentioned are on this site.
I thought it was probably African in origin. Man, I can’t listen to that stuff without breaking out in an immediate smile!
So, Jomo Mojo, did you check out my little tune? It’s about running and keeping your steady pace and then suddenly the old runner’s high kicks in…
“Manic Depression” is in 3/4, which I guess makes it a waltz. I think Jimi had a few others in 3/4 - the bridge to “One Rainy Wish” comes to mind.
Kudos for the mention of Soundgarden. One of the big reasons I’m playing with the drummer I am now is that he picked up “Spoonman” on the first runthrough.
The 4/4 writing rut is real and boggles me to no end. I’ve come up with material that jumps between 3/4 and 4/4 and a few that are 4/4 with some extra beats thrown in here and there, but nothing really exotic.
Just a few more odd meters, off the top of my head:
Tori Amos, “God” (from “Under the Pink”), in 9. Actually, according to the sheet music, it’s alternating 5/4 and 4/4, but 9 is the effect.
Blondie, “Heart of Glass” (IIRC), is mostly in 4/4, but the instrumental break slips into 7 for a while. Funky effect.
BickByro provided Soundgarden as an excellent example, so I’ll mention another Seattle band: Queensryche. On their “Empire” album, they’ve got a couple of weird 7 breaks.
Sting uses a 9, I believe, in “St. Augustine in Hell” on “Ten Summoner’s Tales,” but it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the album.
I wrote a piece of music myself in 7/8, when I composed the score for an adaptation of Brecht’s “Mother Courage.” I tell ya, it takes forever to wrap your brain around it the first time, but once you finally get it, it clicks hard, and becomes second nature.
Small bit of trivia: Brubeck’s amazing “Take Five” is used brilliantly in the film Pleasantville to underscore the scene where the Tobey Maguire character really begins introducing subversive elements into the town. Very smart, and very cool.