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?"

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.

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.

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.

One of the numbers is how long the notes are. The other is how many before the rhythm repeats.

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.

Take Four

For me it is drawing. I think it is because I don’t really picture things. My mind is full of descriptions mostly, not visualization, but I don’t know.

I’ve put a ton of time over the years into trying to cultivate the skill, but 3 dimensions complete escapes me. I cannot picture a 3d object, then draw it. I can get away with some geometries with vanishing line references, but that’s it.

Same. Aphantasia here and I can't draw anything for shit. Well, unless we include things like flow charts.

5/8, 5 beats per measure, eighth note gets the beat.

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.

As a matter of curiosity, you don’t also have aural (auditory tactile) synesthesia do you? That would be wild.

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.

Anything that requires moderate hand-to-eye coordination.

So I was always the worst amongst my buddies at sports, which I hadn't associated with my deficiency yet... then, when I joined the army and realized that, besides running (and swimming, because I lived in front of a pool for most of my childhood), anything that required technique and skill was gonna take me 5x the time to learn compared to my comrades (rope climbing even at my strongest and slimmest, rifle assembly and disassembly, for example) and even then I was just barely passing. Then I tried getting a driver's license whilst still in the army, which was basically a gift in all but name, and damn did I suck at driving. I still do, just less so. 🤣

Thankfully I married a somewhat handy woman. 🤷‍♂️

I get confused by this too. I do some music production in my downtime and end up just doing 4/4 most of the time.

Nope. I didn't know that was a thing. I do get frission response to certain music, but ASMR is generally just annoying/grating to me.

I do get almost physical sensations when reading code, which is kinda wild.

Maybe Bootsy Collins can help explain 4/4
https://youtu.be/IHE6hZU72A4
When he plays "on the one" thats 1 of 4, the first beat of the bar. A repeated grouping of 4 beats.

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 don’t mean to drag this on, but interestingly I dislike the asmr craze. But I do get overwhelming frisson and often very teary eyes with even no upset at certain song segments, especially live organ pieces.

same.

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. 😅

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.

I'm the same way! I don't know about you, but when I was an adult, I learned about dyspraxia (a pretty common coordination/balance/motor disorder - used to be called 'clumsy child syndrome' lol) and having poor proprioception (which is the sense of being able to automatically know and tell where exactly your body parts are in relation to eachother and to other things, where this thing is in relation to that other thing, etc. without really having to think about it) and reading and learning about those helped explain a LOT for me.

I just thought I'd mention it in case it helps you! It really helped me feel less broken and helped me understand myself better, and how to work with it instead of trying to force myself to be 'normal,' when it's not a matter of 'not trying hard enough' like so many people told me it was as a youngin', etc. Anywho, you are soo not alone! :)

division. i can do basic fractions but anything more complicated feels completely unintuitive.

Time signatures are not hard. The top number says how many beats in a measeure. It matters because the first beat of every measure gets a little emphasis. The bottom number is just a convenience for notation. If you have really fast music the you can write it as 2/2 instead of 2/4 and then you can write all the 16th notes as 8ths. Makes music easier to read. But thebsound is exactly the same.

Dream. Or picture anything from memory.

I have an idea in my mind, but it’s not a picture or video like most people have. It’s just very difficult to “see” something.

Yeah I also have autism

Oh zip, thanks for the extended explanation and encouraging words. I always just saw it as the result of my lack of focus and hyperactivity but maybe it's something else, just by itself... I guess I'll have to get checked 🙃. And indeed we are not alone!

Are you saying you don’t understand why you would do 5/8 instead of 5/4 in a faster tempo? Or instead of 3/4, just write triplets?

Yeah this it it for me except I’m decent at drawing, I just can’t get how to make shadows or highlights. Drawing a 3D sphere for example with shadow is so hard for me. Granted I don’t practice, but still.

Interesting how the 4 is kind of ghosted

You could write in triplets in 4/4.

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.

I don’t think everybody understands this, but of those I know that said they do, I don’t believe them haha. Double slit experiment and how one thing can be in two places at once but, only after being measured. And then extend that into quantum computing. I don’t get it and I’ve tried to on multiple occasions.

Somebody help me.

I’m on the extreme end of hyperphantasia and I can’t draw for shit either. I know it is in there somewhere; I project shape, colors and objects into my vision but drawing it is beyond me.

I also have concept/shape, emotion/color, emotion/shape, vision/texture-tactile (/mirror touch) and various other forms of synesthesia. I have a lot of visual “noise” that affects my perception and perspective. It is hard to focus on making drawings that are understandable and relatable for others. When I do draw it is usually complex geometric patterns and colors associated with the “thing” I am trying to draw instead of the “thing” itself. It is hard to describe but I can construct the “thing” and clearly visualize it but when I go to draw it my hand fixates on recreating the shapes and colors of my synesthesia experience of that “thing”.

Wow, this sounded amazing!

Reads like you have aphantasia

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Interesting that a few of the notable known people with it identified are authors. I'm not super familiar with them, but I wonder if it leads to writing more detailed descriptions which can help their written works be more memorable.

Do you find music not amusing, or just can't "sync up" with others' peoples opinions of it?

I quote Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist:

There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, (Einstein) because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. But nature is not classical, dammit, the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of man.

Nobody understands and I think it’s fine to be suspicious of people who say they do.

It might be one of those subjects that takes different people different means to understand because what you wrote also sounded complicated and not intuitive to me.

Edit: might also be since I'm not actively looking for that kind of info.

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.

Math.

Numbers make my mind implode. Anything other than basic adding, subtracting, and multiplication just cause me to shut down. Even division is a struggle, unless it has no remainders.

Huh. It sounds as if maybe you missed a basic building block as a child.

Once you're missing a foundational concept, everything after that is difficult. It's sadly not uncommon - maybe you were ill that week, or you had a teacher that couldn't explain in a way that worked for you, etc.

My work is in maths and stats, my husband is a lawyer, so when he did an introductory finance course a few years ago, I tried to help him understand some formulas that involved percentages. It was an unmitigated disaster. So I called my mom (a retired math teacher) and she started by drawing a circle and saying this is a pie, we cut it into slices, etc. like you would for a young child. At first I was horrified, but she kept building on it, checking he understood at each point, until they reached a point where he wasn't going, "yes, yes, OK". She explained that piece to him and something clicked. Problem solved.

Anyway, that was a long anecdote to tell you, you probably just need to find a good maths teacher who is willing to spend a couple of hours with you building up, until you find that gap. I could ask my mom if you like? She's genuinely a really good teacher.

Edit to add: Alternatively, go through the Khan Institute lessons. Skim them until he starts doing something that isn't obvious. Then go back and watch the previous lesson.

For how music sounds, only the top number matters. If the top number is a 4 (like 4/4 or 4/8), then it sounds like this:

TA-ta-ta-ta TA-ta-ta-ta

A 3 on top (like a 3/4 waltz) sounds like:

TA-ta-ta TA-ta-ta TA-ta-ta

And a 2 on top (like 2/4 or 2/2) sounds like:

TA-ta TA-ta TA-ta TA-ta

Thanks, that helps.

Edit: I suppose I like examples you can see, which might not be universal.

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 😕

That actually helped me. I'm not a musician, but I've never understood what the purpose of the bottom number is. Thanks.

Those accursed Smurfs.