For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
I’m not sure if this answers the question but I feel like the older I get the more I see through “the game of life” and once that illusion gets shattered it’s impossible to unsee. Much of the status seeking, tribal behaviour becomes nearly impossible to partake in once you start seeing what it’s all for.
Go ask a person why their Instagram is filled to the brim with pictures of their face, for example, and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic. Try doing that while being fully conscious about the true motivations behind it. You can’t - something has to give.
However, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Sure you can pat yourself on the back for being above it all but it makes it really difficult for anyone to try and integrate in normal everyday social situations when all of it just feels like a performance.
Yeah I also have autism
autism has nothing to do with this.
In this particular case autism has lots to do with it.
Sure, sure
Oh, it does
There is a difference between being narcissistic and craving validation. It’s completely normal to want validation, feel needed, wanted and appreciated.
It’s very sad that every human need has been turned into a subscription based service.
the problem is people twist themselves into knots to get it these days, and it makes the mentally unwell.
And they hate people who don’t ‘go along’ with the ‘game’ they play.
Narcissism is just pathological validation craving. They’re on the same spectrum. However, I’m not one to judge someone for just posting on instagram.
Narcissists don’t crave validation. They don’t think they even need it, because they already feel so self-assured.
You’re confusing narcissism with insecurity, which is practically the opposite of narcissism.
A narcissist doesn’t think they need your approval, and isn’t going to beg for it. They’ll just explode the moment you express disapproval or disagreement, because that clashes with their worldview and self-image, and that’s something they can’t tolerate.
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those people don’t exist in many people’s lives.
and even if they do, it’s typically only temporary. people who get these lifelong deep authentic friendships… are pretty rare and lucky to have the circumstances in life that allowed for that.
like, a lot of people don’t have those kinds of relationships and never seek them either, the concept just doesn’t exist for them and they live their entire lives on a very surface level understanding of the world.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t understand how I can develop a deep authentic relationship with people who obsessed with shallow things like their social status and how expensive their car is compared to other people’s cars… and that’s what dominates the culture in my city. Or who fly into a long winded speech about their anxiety and despair over the fact they only make 350K last year or their stock portfolio only returned 5.5% instead of the 7% their account manager promised them…
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Only by being yourself you can find people who like you for who you are rather than who you pretend to be. Nobody can beat you at being you but you can only be the second best at pretending to be someone else.
I take that to mean that if you are weird then embrace it. That attracts other similarly weird people and those are the best kind. There’s no point in being liked for being someone you’re not so why pretend.
With who?
It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.
In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.
But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.
A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.
I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.
That is always the case when comparing one’s complex internal life to the perceived external lives of others. It’s never an apples to apples comparison. However social media was just one example. This applies to other forms of signaling as well: designer clothes, latest tech, following trends… Basically almost anything people do that they wouldn’t do if there were no one to see it.
got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death
Couldn’t quite parse the beginning. Who broke through to ego death, again?
and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic.
I encounter this when chatting with a family member and she mentions that she “loves animals” and who “couldn’t hurt a fly” while also being an omnivore. She feels sorry for the animals when she thinks of industrial farming, but does her best to never think about it. When this topic comes up, I don’t say anything (we’ve been through the topic in the past), but she sees the impatience with her bullshit on my face, and gets flustered by the fact that someone doesn’t consider this cognitive dissonance normal.
I can somewhat relate with that. Eating meat is one of the few behaviours that I still do despite being unable to morally defend it. It’s not even that I’m trying not to think about it or have to somehow deceive myself believing that it’s good. I know exactly what I’m doing. The convenience of it simply outweighs the moral guilt.
What I think would possibly make me feel different about it is someone handing me a gun and telling me to shoot a cow. If it turns out that I can’t do it, then that really puts into question the outsourcing of the messy part of it in the first place.
Cool. I love animals and I eat meat and I love it.
I see nothing wrong with it. Death is part of life.
Do you ever ask yourself why it is that you need other people to believe and practice what you believe? And do you find when other peole impose their beliefs on you find it offputting and upsetting?
One can be perfectly happy with the concept of beings dying and being eaten, and still feel nothing but disgust about the meat industry.
I tend to eat meat semi-regularly out of convenice and social norms, but I am fully aware of my hypocrisy. Same way as I am typing this on a device that probably contains parts made with essentially slave labour. Doesn’t make it better. But at least I can avoid the treadmill of having to have the newest iPhone, or eating as much supermarket steak as possible.
Add in a psychedelic experience or two, and it becomes impossible not to recognize how ridiculous it all is.
Can be done without them, of course, but psychedelics can blast you right to that position, for better or worse.
I’ve taken the slow route and have been doing mindfulness meditation for a decade which probably plays a role in all this.
start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic
Humans are narcissistic and selfish because over the millenia the ones that were selfish outcompeted the ones that weren’t. It’s totally natural to be selfish. Some are just better at hiding it than others.
However there is also a simple social aspect to including yourself in photos. It’s a clear visceral way to say “I was here”. A photo without your face does not have capture the “you” part of that statement. Social interaction is not just an exchanging of ideas, it’s also about building relationships, and for that to happen, the “you” part of the equation is vital.
To be fair I rarely include myself in photos, but for the same reason I am also less integrated into my social circles.
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You don’t have to fully integrate, I guess. As in, people don’t have to be your intellectual/ideological peers or see things as clearly, but you can still enjoy their company. If anything, it’s your moral responsibility to guide them and elucidate them when needed because, well, who else is gonna do it? They can’t do it for themselves, else they wouldn’t be posting a million selfies or doing whatever other nonsense they’re up to after their PFC has developed sufficiently. You’re gonna have to lead the blind to water, you don’t want them to die of thirst, right? The way is important too, because you don’t want them to see you as an annoying, moralising, “no fun allowed” kinda guy, they’ll just run away from you… but with the right approach you can be the somewhat wise unc/paternal figure of your group.
Beware though, people WILL call you asking for guidance on your days off and it’ll be up to you to define the limits of your relationships so you don’t end up moving to a cabin in the woods disconnected from everything, but it is definitely rewarding and very prosocial.
I’m at the point where I don’t even try to integrate any more. The only time I leave my flat is against my will because I have to go to work to be able to afford to live.
If its all a fake performance, perform the show well and find yourself in a better position to help more people do the same.
How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I’m going wrong, I don’t reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say “find your tribe” like, I might be the last of my kind.
I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.
I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.
Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.
It’s normal. Hardly anyone makes friends after college or early 20s.
And folks that do, it’s mostly through their children. Because they become friends with the parents of their kid’s friends… because it’s convenient.
It might be normal but it shouldn’t be normalized.
Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅
I basically don’t have any friends of my own anymore. The ones from high school I was never really close enough with to hang out outside school. We were just too different. Almost a decade and a half later and we see each other maybe once a year and don’t talk outside of that.
College was supposed to be a place to meet new people, and I did meet a few, one of which is my current partner. But that also didn’t last past college years, really.
I’m now in a different country, don’t really speak the language well enough and don’t really have energy or time to find new people. Plus, my introversion, social anxiety and health are only making it harder. My partner occasionally comments on me having no friends of my own, but then I look at his friend circle and want to roll my eyes. Most of his friends are from high school years, and he sees them maybe once or twice a year. There are a few he met through work, but it’s easier for him because the field we work in is male-dominated. So for him it’s okay, for me it sucks to be the only woman. But he doesn’t hang out with any of these people on regular basis. Realistically, most people he knows are acquaintances.
I think about this whole situation frequently and it makes me depressed and bitter. I feel like even if I find new friends, I’ll never be the friend, you know? They’ll always have other people they’ve been friends with for longer and I will be either not as important or discarded later. It’s been this way my whole life. Always easily forgotten and replaced.
I’ll never be the friend, you know?
this hits a little too close to home
You aren’t doing anything wrong.
That’s just how life is. Practically nobody makes friends as adults due to the structure of adult life.
As children you have tons of free time and no hangups or social status to maintain. As an adult you have zero free time, lots of hangups, and most adults are obsessed with social status.
Real friends are the ones that stick with you when shit hits the fan. When you’re an adult and you meet new people, you usually want to show yourself from your best side and for everything to go well. She we were kids, shit hitting the fan was somebody kicking a ball into a neighbors window or falling of a bike, minor things as an adult, but as kids that built character. The stakes are so much higher as an adult when things go wrong, so generally you avoid it even though this means that most of your relationships are superficial.
I’m not saying that something horrible must happen in order to get friends as an adult. But sometimes it’s better to simply work against the odds together to form a deeper connection.
that’s true. the stakes are higher and you have way more to lose from a bad friendship.
people forget that there are lots of folks who are happy to exploit, use, and betray you. and when you are a kid that might mean they steal your $20 toy, but as an adult it can be a lot more costly. like your friend can come over, slip your stairs, and they can sue you for damages and take your entire life away. and where i live it’s fairly common for people to threaten lawsuits over the stupidest shit.
To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics.
That could be part of the problem: time signatures aren’t a property of the notes, they’re a property of the song. The time signature is the rhythm and flow of the music. If you try to do a waltz in 4/4, it’s probably not going to sound like a waltz unless you do some really screwy things.
Plus, knowing the time signature helps you figure out why that guy is waving his stick like that while you’re playing.
I give you those “screwy things”. Somebody stripped the fifth beats from Brubeck’s magnum opus, and made the most waltz sounding 4 I’ve ever heard.
It’s funny how stripping out the fourth beat just sounds like a band who doesn’t quite know how Take 5 goes and they’re just winging it: https://youtu.be/t3u8GwMlJaw
Wow, this sounded amazing!
Interesting how the 4 is kind of ghosted
Comment so I can find this later
This. I’m not a musician but have learned many types of dance and the time signature is key for dancing. Maybe it would help OP to do a beginner dance class, to learn time signature in a different context.
Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is a walz and you can’t convince me otherwise.
I’m pretty sure it is in 6/8.
You could write in triplets in 4/4.
Anything can be in 4/4 if you count hard enough.
That really bothered me at first! Kept thinking ‘why ever have a different time sig? No need for 13/8 (or whatever) when you can just sprinkle in double dotted 16th notes tied to 8th note (or whatever).’
Over time I slowly realized that it’s not about technically being able to write it, but rather describing what usually happens. (Tho I still don’t really understand, intuit, or hear any of it well.)
So, the original Mission Impossible theme tune is in 5/4. When U2 re-did it for the 1996 Tom Cruise film, the beginning is in 5/4, and then they transition to a slower 4/4. For most of the “Dee da duuuuuuuuuuuh” sections, as far as I can tell it’s just a beat shorter, but the tempo is lower, when they do reprise the Dun! Dun! Da Da! section they use two measures, 8 beats, making it dun dun dun dun da da.
Fun fact: The original dun dun da da was supposed to be “MI” in morse code. --… dash dash dot dot, with a dash being a beat and a half, a dot being one beat, five beats total. U2 turned it into MMI. ----…
So funny (and kinda sweet) how many people are trying to explain time signature to OP, instead of answering the question.
I’'ve been told all my life that “it’s not what I say, but how I say it” that’s a problem. Apparently my tone of voice is often aggressive when I don’t mean to be. Also, if I’m frustrated about something, people feel that I’m angry at them.
I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, which explains some of it, but sadly hasn’t helped me resolve the issue 😕
So funny (and kinda sweet) how many people are trying to explain time signature to OP
LOL I was checking the comments for exactly this.
My wife and I have ADHD and have the same issue. Emotional regulation is impaired in many with ADHD, so we tend to run emotionally “hotter” than most. We may get more upset about something than an NT person might, hence why we come across as very upset, but we may not see it as particularly intense because that’s a normal reaction in our experience.
Not necessarily what might be causing it for you, but definitely what does it for me and many others I’ve known. DBT helped a lot.
we may not see it as particularly intense because that’s a normal reaction in our experience
I’d never thought about it that way but that would make a lot of sense, thank you.
I had a sort-of similar thing that took me ages to figure out, but it turns out my thinking/concentrating face just looks angry. So people would ask me things, I’d be thinking of a response and they’d think they annoyed me. So I’m trying to work on that, but also I just tell people my thinking face looks angry now and that’s helped a lot lol.
Lying, manipulating, bullshitting, etc.
If you do it, people adore you. If you don’t, they hate you. I notice the most socially popular and adored people are the ones who do this the most.
Everyone says they hate it this type of think, but in behaviour they react very differently. I have even bullshitted and manipulated some folks, and it was terrifying how well it worked. They were like eating out of my hand and believing whatever stupid crap I told them.
Human psychology is terrifying.
As a professional salesperson, I can tell you don’t worry, most other people are also terrible at bullshit and manipulation.
It comes down to this: Most people want to know what you want from them. We’re social animals. Someone who seems self-sufficient reads as a potential threat. The best way to get people to do what you want is to tell them what you want in a way that makes sense to them, because then then can help you out and feel like you’re connected to them.
This is where “lying” comes in, because the reasons you give them for what you want has to their reasons, not your reasons, and, frankly, a lot of people are a little crazy and want crazy things. You can’t tell your alcoholic boss you’re drowsy because you were up all night playing Zelda, you tell her you have a bit of a hangover. Either way, she’ll tell you to drink a cup of coffee and get it together, but the former makes her trust you less and the latter trust you more.
This is a really good explanation. I should tell my kid this to help him with masking. And it’ll be great when he tells the teacher he’s hungover.
This is so weird to me. I Don’t bullshit people or manipulate them. It would be exhausting, but I seem to make friends and acquaintances easily enough.
I live in a city full of tech bros and biotech bimbos. this is all they know from birth to grave.
they find the concept of someone being genuine and non-bullshitty very upsetting and weird. but if you talk to them in bullshit corpo self-branding speak, they are totally into you.
like I’ve had ‘concerned friends’ lecture me on how to bullshittify the way I talk so it’s more socially acceptable. like using ‘pivot’ and ‘synergize’ when talking about myself, and of course constantly referencing my anxiety about my lack of ‘productivity’. or to constantly reference ‘how expensive’ things in casual conservation to let everyone know I’m wealthy and successful… because if you aren’t wealthy what is the point of even being alive?
also if you have a hobby, you can only talk about it reference to how it builds your career or it’s your side hustle.
I would have no friends if those were the only kind of people I could find to talk to.
Cool. I’d rather have some friends than none. So I work with what’s available.
You might be autistic
No. It has nothing to do with autism.
This fediverse’s weird obsession with autism (or adhd) being the ‘answer’ for every social issue you face is mind-blowingly ignorant and stupid.
Unless you are professional diagnosed, you don’t have autism. Your online quizzes and self-diagnoses are just excuses for you to justify your off-putting behaviour and interests. Like, wow you’re into FOSS and obsessed with privacy and are a PC gamer… none of those make you autistic… it’s your incessant mentioning of them and your superiority complex about them that turn people off.
Thank you, much better put than myself.
I see the psyop classifying anyone who hates the bullshit and lies corrupting modern society as autistic has fully paid off.
If you classify tactful social behavior as “lies and bullshitting” it probably IS spectrum related.
Not enjoying manipulative behaviours because of their wider negative implications on society is autistic? The Kool-Aid must taste real good.
Like I said, if you are applying the term “manipulative behaviors” (or lies or bullshitting) to generally tactful social behavior, that is consistent with ASD. If you mean lying, deceit, and gaslighting in a malicious way, OP is probably around toxic people because I think EVERYONE would agree that it is awful.
Maybe you ought to make sure you understand people’s positions before you lash out, yeah?
None of what’s OP wrote was alluding to “generally tactful social behaviour”.
Maybe you should learn to read before you get all defensive, yeah?
I can read and understand nuance. Nothing about what OP said indicates what he is talking about ISNT that either. If you think everyone is lying and manipulative you are either surrounded by toxic people, OR you don’t understand social interactions. Everyone who is socially successful is not being a manipulative liar.
Autism spectrum disorder is a condition related to brain development that affects how people see others and socialize with them. This causes problems in communication and getting along with others socially
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/autism-spectrum-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352928
If you’re having trouble seeing this, talk to your doctor. There is nothing wrong with playing by a different set of social rules unless you don’t understand that you are.
Edit: Or maybe you’re just an asshole. I can relate.
Skateboarding. None of it computes for me. My brother has been a lifelong skater and still rips it up at almost 40, and I see him do shit on the board and I just can’t figure out what the fuck is happening. It breaks physics, it’s like bee flight, none of that crap should be possible.
I watched him go up a very steep incline and do the thing where it’s a kickflip and a pop shove it at the same time, which is enough on its own to break my brain, but he and the board went up and landed at the same angle of the incline like it was flat ground, he and the board went up and down perpendicular to the incline without any vertical drag on the drop and landing. Gravity doesn’t fucking work that way! And how the fuck do their feet and the board just get back together after the board is seizuring mid air and just fucking land and keep going like there are magnets on their feet or something? It’s gods damned wizard shit.
Strapping a snowboard to my feet was pretty intuitive, just keep the downhill edge up. Hard agree, I even wore skater shoes but a basic Ollie was something my brain and limbs just…don’t do that
I have a friend who’s a skater and when he doing a kickflip I asked how it worked, as in, how do you make sure the board doesn’t land upside-down or whatever and he was like, “You just launch off and then deal with it.” which was not at all helpful lol. There must be some sort of logic to it!
It is just physics. Obviously. Getting the intuition for it is pretty difficult without actually doing it. It requires practice but it’s also not just muscle memory. You can figure out a lot of the techniques by thinking about it. It is important to be able to visualise a trick before you have any chance of doing it. It’s a constant process of thinking, trying, thinking, trying, and suddenly you just feel it, and only then can you do it.
As for the physics, it’s always a battle of opposite forces. Gravity does win, but you can fall with style in the meantime. I guess most people can juggle a football a few times simply by kicking the ball and then get in the position where the ball lands. A skateboard is the same, only with less room and you being on top of it. The secret is the Ollie. Your center of gravity is not at your feet, so there’s some room to juggle the board underneath you.
Thats where patterns repeat. It’s just for convenience, an 8th note is an 8th note no matter the signature but its how you count the beats. If a piece is in 3/4 the phrases will feel different from 4/4. So, if youre sight reading, it makes it easier to predict when phrases begin and end, when to come in off rests, etc.
I hope that helps somehow lol.
Also helpful to know where it’s appropriate to take a breath on a wind instrument if it’s not marked.
Getting up early or ever feeling rested. I don’t think ive ever felt good in the morning. Basically, if I have 5 drinks and sleep, I’d feel identical waking up as if I’d had nothing. I also feel the same with 5 hours of sleep vs 10. No difference. And I do sleep its not insomnia, just doesnt work.
regatrdless of your age, get a (screening) sleep exam. RNT docs and audiologists do this with easy to set up devices one can plug in at home.
And this is important. Sleep Apnea is life-shortening and quality-of-life-wrecking.
Could be something like needing a cpap machine. My husband got one and it changed how he slept entirely. Could be a lot of reasons for sleep not being refreshing though!
Get a sleep study. This sounds like a sleep disorder. Especially if you also take naps easily throughout the day.
I’ve always had shit sleep patterns, insomnia as far back as kindergarten. I did eventually get a sleep study done and shocker I have sleep apnea. I got a CPAP and the doc pumped it up so hard. I had facial hair so finding a mask that fits wasn’t easy. Also, I’m a side/stomach sleeper, and if I’m on my back in bed I’ll be side awake for hours. So I tried the CPAP for a couple months.
It still woke me up at 2-3 am every single night, and I had dreams about suffocating. Never used it again
If I’m being honest, I definitely sleep better with the CPAP. But that mask is so fucking annoying I’ve given up on it. Blasts of air in my eyes at 2 am or waking up with the salty bottom of the mask in my mouth… I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I can’t nap haha! Yeah it must be. I’m not overweight and I’m pretty healthy so I didnt think it could be sleep apnea but it could I suppose
You might be nocturnal. I used to work nights and felt better getting up at 4pm every day, even if I had less sleep than I get now getting up at 8am
Could be. I generally don’t feel tired until 1 or 2 am. So making myself sleep at 10 or 11 is hard.
I definitely am. If I’m left to my own devices I almost instantly default to going to bed at 5am-ish and getting up at 11-12. But mostly society won’t let me do that, so I feel like I’m on a night shift permanently.
Shopping. Walking around looking for stuff to buy.
This has NEVER made sense to me. I’ve practically never happened upon something I want to buy in a corporate store
Same. But I’ve had a couple breakthroughs: I enjoy it if I’m looking to buy something for someone else. And also when it’s random junk: thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales, bin stores, that kind of thing. With those it feels like I’m exploring, not just shopping.
Parents are really good at this because it’s their only alooone time
I’ve done this lots of times, especially at malls, only because it’s considered “spending” money. The reality, though, is that I’ll rarely actually buy something.
The people who shop look like zombies and young families cannot afford to be paying the massive retail markups in malls. These people are all racking up credit card debts over a transient endorphin rush.
I’ve had multiple times in my life when people got mad at me for not knowing things I was never told. I have some pretty severe trauma over one especially bad incident and the chain reaction of events it caused.
So I don’t know how others just seem to read each other’s minds to just know things. I don’t know how to know when someone is mad at me until it’s too late, and I don’t know how others apparently don’t have this problem.
this is your own bias working against you.
everyone has this problem. you just don’t see it because you aren’t there every moment of every day in their life, like you are with yourself.
people ‘seem’ to not have this problem because they have learned from experience what other people want, and frankly, what most people want, is mostly the same. so once you figure out the use-case that covers like 90% of people, they are easy to please.
plus most people are dumb animals and if you treat them like they are… you rarely fail.
This 1 million times.
I’ve always told my friends and significant others to just tell me what they are thinking or wanting. It truly is that simple with me. I do not beat around the bush, nor do I appreciate others doing that. We are adults (those I tell this to) so just tell me, “Hey, I want to do this on this day” or “Hey, I really wish you would do this thing”.
“I am not, and never will be, a mind reader.”
Is this like, “I didn’t know you were mad” or “I didn’t realize I was supposed to tip my hairdresser” or “I didn’t realize they’d turn off our electricity if zi didn’t pay the bill”? The first is pretty complicated, but the second two are various flavors of “proactive research is part of maturity”.
Love and affection. As someone who’s parents have a bunch of psychological problems, paired with growing up poor as an immigrant. I never in my life have experienced either love or any sort affection for either family nor strangers. For context my mother is a prefect example of a sociopath and I’m 80% sure my dad is autistic. Neither of those conditions exactly scream empathy. I never heard the words ‘I love you’ spoken with the eyes, or any sort of meaning behind them. Listening to daily (and I’m not exaggerating here) screaming matches for 30 years has given me the impression that those words don’t really mean anything to them anyway. Never having had a safe place to develop those feelings and given that I’m not exactly easy on the eyes means that I have somehow managed to become full grown, mentally stable adult with empathy, and a yearning for affection and acceptance without a single fibre of love in my body. Never have I had an interaction other than quid pro quos, “I want something from you, you want something from me.” never “I want you, you want me.” I literally can’t imagine what it’s like waking up next to somebody, feeling emotionally safe or having somebody genuinely wanting to spend time with you. I know that there are currently literally billions of people for whom this the most normal thing in the world but for me that is borderline incomprehensible. I would want to wish that kind of lonelines on my worst enemy.
I’m a dude BTW.
This seems common for people from dysfunctional households. I come from a similar (though not as extreme) background and I wouldn’t consider myself capable of love. Not in a way that matters, at least.
Music et al. I can recognise talent, I can recognise good music, bad music, and music I dislike.
But for the love of von Neumann, I can’t make heads or tails of musical theory, let alone translate it to an instrument. I even suck at Guitar Hero.
Mine is similar. I adore music but I can’t lock into a melody to save my life. Songs I love & have heard a hundred times before—I’ll try to hum or whistle along with them and I’m all over the place. It’s like I’m purposely trying to sound bad — but that’s actually the very best I can do.
I can relate, I’m an avid listener to music. I’ve tried playing guitar and piano but I cannot manifest it somehow.
Music theory ditto. I usually love nerdy mathy content but somehow music theory finds no place to, well… resonate in my brain.
Do you find music not amusing, or just can’t “sync up” with others’ peoples opinions of it?
No, it’s not that. Consuming music, having an opinion about it isn’t the issue.
It’s when it comes to MAKING it is when I throw in the towel.
I understand time signatures in theory, but not in practice. I comprehend what they are and what they mean, but they don’t make sense to me. I don’t understand what they do or why they’re necessary.
Like I get it, the bottom number tells you how many beats are in a whole note. Most commonly 4, but sometimes 8 or something else.
The top number tells you how many beats are in a measure. In common time, that’s again 4.
But mathematically, wouldn’t that mean 3/4 time is the same as 6/8 time? They’re equivalent as fractions. But when I ask a musician they don’t explain it, they just tell me “No, they’re different. That’s 3/4, this is 6/8.” And usually with this undertone like “Are you stupid? This is so obvious, what part are you not getting?”
From what I gather, 6/8 time is usually done in pairs of triplets. So it does sound rhythmically different than 3/4. But no one ever tells you that, not even when the concept is introduced in textbooks on music theory. They just tell you “and this is 6/8 time,” as if you’re just supposed to know how and why that’s in any way different from 3/4 time…
From what I gather, 6/8 time is usually done in pairs of triplets. So it does sound rhythmically different than 3/4. But no one ever tells you that, not even when the concept is introduced in textbooks on music theory. They just tell you “and this is 6/8 time,” as if you’re just supposed to know how and why that’s in any way different from 3/4 time…
I think it is too. I figured it out when I read that Jocko Homo is in 7/8 and it’s very clear because of the staccato notes, 3 by guitar 4 by synth. Another way to think of it is the first beat is accented. So 4/4 is ONE two three four ONE two three four. 5/4 is ONE two three four five ONE two three four five.
I think a lot of musicians don’t really fully understand it so they can’t explain it. Kinda like how programmers can’t really explain casting. And don’t you programmers dare tell me about cows in a pasture or a barn or whatever that analogy is. Just translate your line of code with the word “cast” into a sentence that makes sense. You can’t.
About Casting, at least in the granddaddy of programming languages, C, just meant interpreting the value of a variable as if it was a different kind of variable. Important detail is that variables are actually just memory locations and the number of bytes that conform it. So if you have a variable x of type string that holds the letter A, and a variable y also of type string with the letter B, if you do
x+y
You get ‘AB’. But if you cast the variables like this:
(int)x + (int)y
You get 131
To put it in words as you asked, you are saying “please add the values located at memory locations x and y, but treat the values found there as if they were numbers, and not the ASCII codes for letters (which is what I had originally told you was there)”.
It’s been almost 30 years since the last time I actually used this, so I might be recalling something wrong.
Played for over 20 years, aced my music theory final while I was still in school. Have minimal issues translating and coordinating with other musicians professionally.
Me too bud.
They say it’s about groove and feel but that’s highly subjective and falls apart the second polyrhythms get involved.
In the end, anything can technically be written in any time signature, imh It just comes down to what’s easiest (or most obnoxious/ gimmicky) to read / write.
I mean I get why you would want to use 3/4 time instead of 4/4 time. For instance if you’re composing a waltz, you would want to use 3/4 time, because the rhythmic pattern repeats every 3 beats. Or for something like “da daa, da daa, da daa, da daa”
It’s more convenient to use a time signature that aligns with the repeating rhythm. But that only requires the top number.
To me, the bottom number has always been utterly meaningless. Sure you can fit two triplets in a 6/8 measure as opposed to one triplet in 3/4, but you could compose the same thing in 3/4 and just use two measures for the motif instead of one, and make it a faster tempo, and suddenly it’s played exactly the same way…
This is why I prefer to use trackers instead of sheet music when possible. All I want to look at is what pitch the notes are and how long they are. I don’t like key signatures either. It’s better, for me, for each pitch to have its own space.
Songs are made from repeating patterns of beats and melody. The time signature tells you what that pattern looks like. If you just memorise all the notes I suppose it matters less. But if you wanted to improvise like with a guitar solo or whatever that’s the rhythm you can use to improvise with.
It’s the rhythm equivalent of the key/chord progression for the melody. If you know the chord and when/how it changes through a song, and you know the basic rhythm building block you can just make up notes that are guaranteed to sound great with the other instruments playing.
I took piano lessons for many years and I could sight-read sheet music … sorta. As long as the notes were within the staves, I knew exactly what key to play. It was when notes were above and below the staves that I had to stop and count how many little lines were attached to each note to figure it out. Obviously that messed up my rhythm a bit lol.
I’m a programmer and I’ve spent thirty years writing music composition software and I never once even thought about incorporating traditional sheet music representation. It’s just so clunky and poorly designed for the job. And when you start getting into microtones it’s completely hopeless.
I am not a musician and there are MANY people that know MUCH more about music theory than me.
e.g. 6/8 time. 6 is how many beats are in a bar. 8 is how many bars. Why important? So we know when the music gets back to the start of the cycle… Kinda. There must be a beginning and an end. Why is No. of beats important? So we have an idea of the feel and how many notes roughly we can play within that. Why is 6/8 different to 3/4? Accents on a 3/4 the accent is typically on the 1 ² ³ 1 ² ³ and in a 6/8 the accent is going to mildly be on the 1 but more noticeable on the 4. Think MJ’s “The Way You Make Me Feel”. 6/8 has drive and the feeling of the accent on the UP beat.
Beyond this simplicity music is maths. Do you need to know the rules? No. Do whatever you want. But if you know the rules, you can exploit them; like musicians and composers do to create complex compositions and polyrhythms.
Hope this helps in any way.
No, the top number is beats per measure. The bottom number is how many beats are in a whole note. For example, in 6/8 time a whole note has 8 beats, making an eighth note one beat. As opposed to 3/4 time in which a quarter note is one beat.
But the exact same thing can be accomplished just by changing the tempo.
As for the accents, yeah, that’s what I gather the only difference is. But it’s never explicitly taught that way, and there’s nothing hardcoded into the logic of time signatures that suggests it must be that way.
Yeah a lot of music notation has implicit/hidden elements that aren’t ever really explained. A lot of things are done because someone “feels” like it should be that way, and no one questions it for whatever reason.
It’s more 123 vs 123-456. In 3/4 the first of each triple is rhythmically always as strong, while in 6/8 the 1 is stronger than 4
A non trivial amount of the reasoning is simplicity of reading and writing music. You could transpose everything to 4/4, but it would require a lot of weird patterns.
Yeah a lot of ways to write it, and that’s part of it - depending on the tempo and phrasing it may be easier or harder to read the music in different time signatures, so there’s some flexibility. Like in 3/4 if you have phrasing that would carry a note from beat three across to beat one of the next bar, in a lot of places, that’s messier to write and read than if it’s e.g a quarter note within a 6/8 bar.
And a whole note is always the length of the bar, so in 6/8 a whole note isn’t eight beats, it’s six. The bottom number represents what length note counts as one beat - in 6/8 an 8th note is one beat (and there would be 6 8th notes per bar) a quarter note is two beats, a half note is three and a whole note is six.
I’m betting different composers had preferences as well.
You’re confusing a bar with a measure. The measure is the smaller interval.
Also, the bottom number is how many beats are in a whole note. Because there are 8 beats in a whole note, that means an eighth note is one beat. A whole note is 8 beats in 6/8 time. Just like it’s 4 beats in 3/4.
The top number is how many beats per measure. i.e., 6 eighth notes in 6/8 time; 3 quarter notes in 3/4 time.
Wait, so then what’s the difference between a bar and measure?!
I think I get it, so a whole note is 8 beats and there’s 6 to a measure, so the whole note carries on for two beats into the next measure, ya?
Yes, pretty much.
If a note is a letter and a measure is a word, then a bar is like a sentence. Typically 4 or more measures make up a bar, and they sometimes span more than one line. When you see a measure that ends with two vertical lines, that’s the end of a bar.
Socialization.
I cannot, and I mean cannot, flip a map in my mind. North has to be pointing north or my brain just keeps messing up.
There was a test in the back of Scientific American magazine a long time ago with pairs of 3d models (the stick and ball things people use to show molecular structures) and they turned them in different directions and asked “are these identical or mirror images” how many can you answer in 5 minutes.
I stared at it for an hour and couldn’t do even one. Like, I was crying by the end of the hour because I felt so stupid but my mind, it just couldn’t tell.
I’ve never had trouble reading but learned to read very young (barely 3 year old) like a language, sort of before even knowing the alphabet that well - it’s not a dyslexia situation. But I sure couldn’t see those differences in the quiz. At all.
I once dungeon-mastered a DnD campaign. For the map I just took a map of North America and rotated it 90°. Not one person noticed.
Could it be dyscalculia instead of dyslexia? From what I’ve heard poor sense of direction is a common symptom of the former.
I was not great at math in early school, rote memorization not my strong point but loved algebra, enjoyed calculus and actually work as an accountant. When in elementary school I could always rock word problems in math, better at understanding/applying than the literally calculating. So I don’t know, but not likely.
Pretty bad with right and left but honestly very good at moving around in real space - I orient myself (obviously) on north, south, east, west. I have a great sense of direction in the actual world.
