Directions. I'm just clueless to the point it's a problem.

you are describing my experience with math almost 1:1, it's uncanny... division is unintuitive, i've re-learned calculus from scratch like four times during my school career and none of the actual math made intuitive sense, trig never clicked. i've been doing computer graphics for like 6 years now and despite trig being everywhere i still need like 30 seconds to puzzle out what sin(0) is for the thousandth time. but i aced combinatorics without even trying as soon as i heard that the funny fraction-looking thing with parentheses is called "n-choose-k", and if you give me a boolean expression with 5 levels of nested parenthesis and i can simplify it in my head in seconds.

Shopping. Walking around looking for stuff to buy.

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.

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...

With who?

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

Could be. I generally don't feel tired until 1 or 2 am. So making myself sleep at 10 or 11 is hard.

I once went to a place to meet some people. The people I came to meet were in two distinct groups, chatting. I didn't know which group to join, so I stood in between them, listening to both. First one was talking about something boring and stupid, the second the same. So I just... stood there. Outside both groups, staring at the floor, wondering if I should just leave.

The "TAK-a-ta's" are both super helpful and oddly reminiscent of Lisa Simpson learning how to dance "Tap-a Tap-a Tap-a!"

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.

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.

Parents are really good at this because it's their only alooone time

It's a skill! If you're interested maybe join a dance class, boxing/MMA class, pottery class, or do some improv!

I would have joined your group.

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.

holy shit, now that's a post. very well written, easy to follow. nice.

unfortunately, what you've described is basically what i've been doing, which is way more steps than i tend to need with the others. i don't know if it exists in other places but we had an entire module in middle school on "överslagsräkning", which basically translate to "rough calculations". it was about using iterative methods like this to land at a plausible solution to a problem.

unfortunately, i mostly need actual solutions. as an example i'll tell you what i did today.

today, i tried to refine an algorithm that, given a set of points (represented by a c array) and a "fractional index" (a positive non-integer value) can give result for a number between two defined points. i had previously done this through simple linear interpolation, but since we sample data from actual physical objects the points tend to represent a curve, and the common way to solve that is with a lagrange polynomial. so, i found an algorithm that, given a set of n + 1 points, evaluates the unique lagrangian of at most degree n that intersects all the points at the given index. i split the terms out to an (a + b) / c form and then i realised that i have no fucking idea what i'm doing.

like yes, i can run the algorithm to see if the numbers line up, but i could never actually do the math. i'm not talking about the algebra part, i'm talking about the arithmetic. if i plug some numbers in and do the parts i can do, i end up with something like 0.23 / -7 and i don't even know where to start. i have no idea where that would even land. so, while i can verify that my test data works, i have no way to quickly extrapolate numbers. which in turn means i can't come up with plausible input. i'm back to using a calculator for that, which is so damn annoying.

i know, right?! like, a friend of mine was doing a homebrew computer project a year or so ago and had issue with some complex instruction logic in the alu or whatever, and without having done it for over a decade i just sketched up a karnaugh map and struck two terms out. i even confused myself with that one.

Thanks that's a great explanation

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...

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.

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.

It is more intuitive in groups of 3 notes. 3/4 is often used for a waltz, TA-ta-ta, TA-ta-ta.

The emphasise is on the first note of the 3.

6/8, as I have learned from this thread, has the emphasis a little on the first but mostly on the 4th, so Ta-ta-ta TA-ta-ta. It moves differently. If you use a series of 8th notes, the whole thing flips, and 6/8 feels fluid, and 3/4 feels janky.

The time signatures have a purpose, it's just not.....well explained.

The standard was set by households that had domestic servants. Either actual rich people or southern whites exploiting low wage black women and girls.

It was maintained for a time in the 1950s with drugs. Alcoholism was rampant, and tranquilizers for women. Miltab, mommies little helpers. You can see this in media well into the 90s with vicodin, Lexapro.

Drug yourself into a haze and you can do it. You won't have time for a social life.

The point is it's not a realistic standard. Live communaly and it starts to work better. Otherwise give yourself grace.

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.

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.

Oh that reminds me of the time my then boyfriend, a mathematician, tried to teach me maths. It was like teaching someone French by reading out a few pages of Sartre's La nausée, then saying "OK, that's the basics covered..."

Walking

Sounds like the village of Hinderstap from The Wheel of Time series

piano

This has NEVER made sense to me. I've practically never happened upon something I want to buy in a corporate store

If being kind isn't your default then it's your job. Do your job, were all counting on you.

Interesting approach. I like dreams as they're stupid little processed version of what I've been preoccupied with and what I've lived recently.

I can see the appeal of no dreams as you've put it. Same what I think of lucid dreaming. I just know I'll start cramming work in there too.

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.

Thank god for GPS. Even now people keep trying to give me directions and I'm like just shut up, I have a phone that will tell me where to go.

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.

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

Could it be dyscalculia instead of dyslexia? From what I've heard poor sense of direction is a common symptom of the former.

I probably would have stopped wondering and started wandering home after not very long.

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.

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.

Driving stick. I've tried on several cars at this point, and have only successfully gotten moving without stalling like twice. The worst part is I can shift pretty smoothly once the car is in motion, but I just can't seem to figure out how to get it in motion.

Math! I'm a software guy and generally find STEM topics highly intuitive. I do fine with the stuff through middle school - PEMDAS, algebra, that kind of stuff. But the higher levels concepts like logarithms and derivatives; no matter how many times they're explained to me they just don't quite click. I can plug numbers into formulas and get the answer I need, but I don't understand what's happening or why that particular formula is what's needed.

got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death

Couldn't quite parse the beginning. Who broke through to ego death, again?

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.

ONE and uh TWO and uh ONE and uh TWO and uh

ONE and Two and Three and ONE and Two and Three and

Knitting. I just don't have the coordination

Ok good it’s not just me. I really wish I could find a way to understand it better. At this point in my life it’s not really necessary so I guess I’m ok then?

I think the X files music was a 6/8. NAH na na na na na, NAH na na na na na, it doesn't sound like a waltz!

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