How to tell the time signature of a song by listening?

Question

Every song has some kind of time signature; even if different parts of the song have different time signatures, there is always a time signature. When learning a song by ear and no score, knowing the time signature and where beat 1 is significantly helps understand the rhythmic feel of the song. Is there a simple technique you can use to determine the time signature of a song just by listening?

Answer 1

You can think of a time signature as numbers representing the meter, which is what you're really interested in here.

A meter is a pattern of accented and unaccented beats. To find the meter by listening, try and find the most strongly accented beat. That's the downbeat. Then find how many beats there are before the next one. That will tell you the top number of the time signature—the number of beats in the measure.