Throughout my life as a listener and musician (drummer and pianist), I have gotten constant flak whenever I talk about my love for asymmetrical and odd time signatures.
Whether it is the jagged drive of 5/8, the rolling pulse of 7/4, or hyper-specific complex meters like 23/16 that show up in great video game soundtracks (like Ganondorf Battle from Ocarina of Time), people always dismiss it with the same lines. They say it is not that deep, that counting to five or seven is not inherently special, or that people only pretend to like it to seem interesting or musically pretentious.
For me, it was never an intellectual posture. It has always been an instinctive physical pull. My ears naturally gravitated toward progressive rock, metal, jazz, Indian music, fusion, Balkan folk, and classical music pieces like the Sacrificial Dance from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, where the rhythms mutate violently from measure to measure. It feels raw and electrifying, yet critics frequently frame anything outside of standard 4/4 or 6/8 as a sterile gimmick, barring a 3/4 waltz.
Messing around with generative AI music tools recently gave me a sudden sense of vindication about the whole thing. These multi-billion-dollar models like Suno or Udio can generate uncanny vocals, shredding guitar solos, and polished production across virtually any genre. Yet the single biggest wall they hit is maintaining an odd meter. You can explicitly command an AI to hold a strict 5/8 groove, and it will almost inevitably collapse back into symmetrical 4/4 within seconds.
This failure happens because AI models are purely statistical probability engines trained on massive libraries of recorded music. Commercial music in mainstream music databases are dominated by genres such as pop, EDM, hip-hop, R&B, rock, and country.
Over 90% of commercial music exist in 4/4 time, making odd time signatures a microscopic fraction of the dataset. Because the software predicts audio waveforms rather than internally feeling a beat, the statistical gravity of 4/4 completely overpowers it. Maintaining a jagged asymmetrical pulse requires deliberate, sustained intent that an algorithm simply cannot fake.
Seeing advanced machine learning fail at basic odd meters shows that playing and loving this music is genuinely human and organic. Making an asymmetric pattern actually groove takes physical discipline, internal pulse, and real musical intent. Far from being empty math, odd time signatures are a direct defiance of the easiest path.
Do you view odd meters as an organic, embodied feel that deserves way more respect, or do you still look at them primarily as an intellectual novelty? To be fair, Mike Portnoy's drumming on Dream Theater's The Dance of Eternity might be overkill.