That one took me a moment as well ... why is there a difference between 2/2 and 4/4, or 6/8 and 3/4 ...

It started to make sense once I saw it as an abstraction. It denotes a certain emphasis on certain notes that would look really awkward and hard to read if it was repetitively written out for every note (not that I can really read music anyway).

I have a much harder time with harmony theory ... like, I get that some successions have a "resolving" feel but other than that I never got why I shouldn't just jumble up pitches any way that sounds ok to me. Ultimately I decided that I'll spend my life composing music, deliberately ignoring harmony theory as material ...

Other things that elude me a mostly social nature ... like, some people are just amazing at striking up some or another deal or barter their way through life at a discount, simple because they connect well to people. I never got how they do that ... not sure whether it's something you can learn

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.

Grammar, I am not good at

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.

Comment so I can find this later

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.

Learning a second language. Having a processing disorder and a shit short term memory makes it hard for me to comprehend. I'm accepting advice if anyone succeeded with a stubborn learning disability.

Actually having hope for the future of our miserable species

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.

Check out ‘Angine de Poitrine's Math Rhythms Explained’. They use a loop pedal in the context of math-rock with changing time signatures, so they must fit all changes in a track into a fixed length. For those good at time signatures (not me), they also have some misdirections between the loops of different instruments.

Try trackers, in particular Renoise (it's free to use as a demo, without exporting, though there are workarounds for that). At the first glance, it's a spreadsheet where you place samples playing notes. In practice, it works great for people like me who can barely tell what different notes sound like, much less feel intervals and stuff. You just put your samples such that you get the rhythm you want, and don't forget to twiddle the effects because they make a big difference. Of course, this works best for dancey electronic music.

Okay, then what does the bottom number do? It seems pretty essential for complex rhythms like 5/17 or whatnot.

I've seen the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory being recommended to those who have a hard time learning to draw. The commenter also provided examples of their own drawings before and after, and it was night and day.

However, I looked through the examples a bit, and am wary of reading the books myself, because the drawings there are very representative, while I'm aiming for a more wacky style. It could also be that the books are mainly about drawing from references, not sure yet.

i'm a senior computer engineer currently specialising in signal processing algorithms on constrained systems 🙃 so i have really tried getting that intuition to stick, including the khan stuff, for years, but no. i have to double-check everything i write out because i can't visualise it as soon as there's division involved, unless it involves powers of two.

it genuinely is as you said, it feels like i was ill for a week in middle school and suddenly i didn't understand anything. and now i don't have the energy to do studying on my off hours. thanks for the offer though, that's very sweet.

weirdly us-centric take considering you guys have to use arithmetic for vat

The bottom number is just how you write a single beat.

If the bottom is 2, you write a beat as a half-note (𝅗𝅥). If the bottom is 4, you write a beat as a quarter note (♩)
If the bottom is 8, you write a beat as an eight note (♪)

But it all sounds the same way. A beat is still a beat. This just makes is easier to write certain rhythms.

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.

But what about weird fractions like 5/7 and such?

I utilize an idea stack, I can't finish one until I've touched the others

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.

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.

autism has nothing to do with this.

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.

that's fascinating and DIDN'T HELP AT ALL HOLY SHIT.

it's like saying "oh you don't understand basic physics? here watch Einstein explain his most complex concepts"

Well, quantum mechanics and quantum computing in general are very complex, and there are big parts of the field that nobody understands.

But double slit experiment is often depicted misleadingly made to seem a lot more magical than it is. The simplified explanation is that light moves as a wave and interacts like a particle.

The experiment sends light through one photon at a time. If the light travels through a single slit, it will form a wave pattern with one big peak. If there are two slits, the photon's wave travels through both and moves like you would see waves of water do, making an interference pattern where the ripples coming from each slit collide. The weird part is that when you try to measure the photon as it passes through the slits, the only way you can observe it is by intetacting with it (so it interacts like a particle). It then then produces the patterns you would get with it passing through only one slit or the other, without the interference created by going through both.

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.

If it makes you feel better, I don't think being able to visualize helps as much as it would seem. Drawing is just hard.
I say this as someone who has a very active mental imager and has been drawing (poorly) my whole life.
The technical aspects of drawing/painting etc., is really just about understanding the theory, application, and practice.

Does it help? Sure, a little but nothing I've ever drawn has come out looking like the mental picture with any satisfaction and I could probably do just as well with a verbal or written description to go off of. And references, of course.
Several famous modern artists have aphantasia.

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.

You might be autistic

You might have adhd

It might be normal but it shouldn’t be normalized.

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.

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

It would be interesting if you took a photo of something, drew that image from memory, then overlaid your drawing on the photo.

Anything can be in 4/4 if you count hard enough.

It's just an example of guys who definitely must count stuff so that it always fits exactly into the loop while also being precisely timed between the guitar tracks and the drums

As for physics, iirc the book series by Feynman is recommended to really dig all the stuff from the basics to the fancy theories, and Feynman was no slouch himself.

Also, Einstein was teaching students in the US later in life.

I see the psyop classifying anyone who hates the bullshit and lies corrupting modern society as autistic has fully paid off.

You aren't really going to find songs in "5/17" time or 5/7 time, if at all. I believe the bottom number is meant to be divisible by 2 (2, 4, 8, 16). I'm not a musician, but I have an interest in music. The bottom number just explains which note you're using (half, quarter) and how many beats would be in the measure. Top number is how many beats in the measure. To use a previous example, 7/8 looks like

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

Sometimes you'll find Songs in 14/8 time, (YouTube link) which could be divided into two measures of 7/8 depending on how you might like to read it.

How to read a cookbook, or a recipe. I can follow one and hope for the best, or use it it remind myself of details of a dish I've made before, but the way most recipes and cookbooks are written is crazy to me. I can't visualize the final result at all, even with pictures. This is just about the only arena where the video format seems to be better than text, and that's outrageous.

Why would the amount of something and the instructions for it he in different places? In recipes where you make a dry mix and a wet mix completely separately and then comine them, why aren't those different subsections? Why in all the hemispheres of the earth is the oven temperature, usually the first thing you have to attend to, not the first line of the recipe?

They're not written in chronological order or in logistical subsections. I keep having to flip back to the ingredient list to find out how much of something I'll need (when I'm reading it, I know how to assemble my mise en place, thank you). The best thing I've found is to rewrite the whole recipe myself in a way that makes sense to me:

Two columns, one with ingredients and their anounts grouped by subsection and chronologically within that subsection; the second with instructions for what to do with those ingredients. It's easy for me to tell at a glance, oh, here's the part I can do in advance, here's me preparing the Holy Trinity, here's the spice blend I add midway, here's the part where I can take a smoke break, here's the garnish at the end.

PS. Time signatures are all about which dance steps you can do to the music, in my experience.

Time signatures are fun! It took me awhile to understand them too, but now I find myself counting to weird music whenever I can. I listen to a lot of prog rock/metal, which helps with that (they use freaky time sigs constantly).

To answer the question, it's the American Insurance system. I thank whatever God will listen every day that my wife understands it, and worked at a brokerage for a bit, because I'd be lost just trying to pay for a visit at the dentist or whatever.

One thing this reminded me of is Bootsy Collins explaining funk. How when you're playing bass you put the root on the one. https://youtu.be/H2MMuNkCLZY

The time signature is about emphasis, and there are common ones. I've bolded and italicized big and small emphases on the beat numbers.

Common time: 1 2 3 4 , 1 2 3 4 ,... example peter gunn theme

Cut time: 1 2, 1 2, ... example stars and stripes forever

Waltz: 1 2 3, 1 2 3, ... example the blue danube

6/8: 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6,... example the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald

5/4: 1 2 3 4 5, 1 2 3 4 5,... example Mission Impossible theme

Some time signatures are very similar, like waltz and 6/8, the difference is where the emphasis is placed. Waltz has just one big, emphasis placed on the one, where 6/8 is also groups of three, but has a big emphasis on the 1 and a smaller emphasis on the 4th beat. An alternate way to count in 6/8 time is 1 2 3, 2 2 3; 1 2 3, 2 2 3;... which emphasizes how 6/8 time feels like two groupings of three, within one bar, with the biggest emphasis on the one.

This is the basic version -- composers will play with expectations and add their own accents on top, etc., so you won't always hear the emphasis as I described. Reasonable people might even disagree about whether a piece of music is better described by one time signature or another, because they can be so similar.

I was in band growing up and i also couldn't explain time signatures even though i was able to read music and play them; it is something you learn without necessarily being able to verbalize, since it is about how the music feels, based on subtle emphasis.

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.

I only even follow through on plans though dogged, jaw-clenching stubbornness.

Fantastic music

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.

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In a nod to the OP, there is also a short course on music theory.

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".

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.

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.