All Eurovision Songs Written in Irregular Time Signatures (1956-2023)

Описание: Welcome back to an updated version of the irregular time signatures video!

The vast majority of Eurovision songs (and pop music in general) are written in 4/4- this means there are 4 beats in every bar, and you can count to 4 along with the music. Examples from this year include Sweden, Finland, Israel and Italy.

3/4 and 6/8 are also very common time signatures, and were very popular in the old days of Eurovision. Denmark 1963 and Luxembourg 1973 are classic examples of 6/8, and France 2021 is a recent successful example. For songs in 3/4, Norway 1995 is a popular example, and 12/8 songs from this year include Norway and Cyprus. Spain this year alternates every bar between 3/4 and 6/8.

Irregular time signatures don't fit the "duple" or "triple" based categories, the most common of which being 5/4 and 7/8- these are what I will be showing you in the video! There are only 11 of them, some of which even still only have sections in these time signatures. You can also get time signatures with 11 beats or even 13 beats, as well as an irregular variant of 9/8, but there haven't been any songs like this in Eurovision yet! (Although the chorus of "Circle of Light" from UMK 2017 is in 11/4, and a few Serbian national final songs such as "Muškarčina" and "Neka, neka" are in 9/8).

Special shoutout to the late Arne Bendiksen who composed the first 2 songs on this list!

NOTES:
I didn't include any songs which may have short phrases in irregular time signatures only for the purpose of transitions- only songs with at least one considerably long section in an irregular time signature have been included.

The denominators of the time signatures could in theory be any power of 2 but within the context of sheet music notation, it's necessary that the most sensible and understandable one is used- this is why I have labelled Latvia 2023 as 5/8 despite faster songs being written as 5/4 (although they could all just as well be the other one) because if it was written on sheet music, there wouldn't have to be any tempo change going into the chorus and other sections which are very clearly in 6/8.