@KydiaMusic seriously though, the ONE song I have up (https://combustionvehicles.bandcamp.com) has Bb as a start to the chorus, I'm not sure if it's minor, maybe? Is the song WRITTEN in it? Maybe. I'm counting it. Especially since I've been working on that song and ones like it for like, 20 years? Sheesh 😂
@KydiaMusic That there list seems pre-modern guitar.
Now “effeminate,” seen against E minor, is one of those gender-normative words that has no usefulness anymore, but E minor, when I employ it, is a key for anger or existential seeking.
Truthfully, I favor Em, G, D, F, B-flat, Am, Bm because they’re easy for me on the guitar, and some of those keys are within reach of my clarinet mediocrity and the three buttons I can use adequately on my F/Bflat/Eflat Diatonic accordion.
Let's make up the emotions for the other missing keys!
F# major - persnickety and pedantic
F# minor - hermetic and hermitic
Gb major - agreeable but lazy
Gb minor - lazy but agreeable
Ab major - stressed and hopeful
Ab minor - wistful and dreamlike
Eb minor - wandering and solitary
C# major - peaceful and uplifting
C# minor -melancholy and dramatic
D# major - confidently incorrect
D# minor - trollish and disingenuous
By “I never got music” do you mean you don’t understand/enjoy music when you hear it, or that you don’t understand the notation/theory of music? Because one does not preclude the other.
@chris@mcmullin
I’ve met at least one person who didn’t really enjoy or appreciate music, per her own admission. Although maybe she would feel differently if suddenly there was no music in movies and games, in stores, etc.
I know another person who was very good at reading sheet music & could play any music you put in front of her flawlessly. But she was tone deaf. She couldn’t hear when something sounded wrong, so if the notation was incorrect…😬
@KydiaMusic@chris
I’m having a hard time imagining a musician who can play flawlessly but is tone deaf. Was she a pianist? There aren’t many instruments a person like that could play in tune.
@chris@KydiaMusic
Beethoven wasn’t tone deaf, though, he was deaf deaf—eventually. But his musicianship was highly developed before he lost his hearing, and his inner ear or aural imagination remained.
Evelyn Glennie is an excellent deaf percussionist, who describes herself as hearing through other parts of the body.
I was taking “tone deaf” to mean indifferent to pitch, which would be pretty limiting for most instruments.
@mcmullin@chris absolutely!
What I don’t understand about tone deafness is…I feel like my sense of pitch has improved over time, especially working in a DAW where you can tune any instrument as needed. With “perfect” tunings of digital instruments to compare against, physical/analog instruments and vocals sound more out-of-tune to me now if they’re not also bang-on in tune.
Surely tone deafness is something one could ameliorate over time as well?
I think the general attitude of claiming one is “tone deaf” when asked to participate in a music activity is a “I’m untrained and uncomfortable with that” with zero curiosity or willingness to learn behind it
whereas, if you enjoy tonal music, you’re not tone deaf
How does #amusia work in cultures with tonal languages? (Any #linguistics folks know? This must have been studied.)
If as many people were truly “tone deaf” as claim to be, and if the proportion were the same in China, then there’d be at least a hundred million Chinese people unable to speak intelligibly or understand speech well. So it must be either much less common or much less of an obstacle.
@mcmullin@mattly
From what I understand of tonal language, it's not about hitting a specific pitch, but more about being able to rise or lower in pitch relative to where you started your sentence. I could be wrong, tho.
@KydiaMusic@mattly
I speak Mandarin, badly, at a roughly intermediate level. And Mandarin has just 4 tones, so it’s not as complicated as many other languages. So I’m no expert but I can answer this. The tones are really pitch contours, and they are relative, not fixed. You could usually understand enough from context probably to know what people mean even if you don’t register the tones. 1/…
@KydiaMusic@mattly
But if you speak with the wrong tones, (as I often do because I forget which one I need) then people just look at you blankly. Or worse, you say things that make perfect sense but aren’t the words you think you’re saying. Think of the tones like the vowels in English. If someone said “ham” when they meant “home” you might or might not still understand, but if they mixed up all their vowels at random they’d make no sense at all.
For two years before I realized my mistake, every day when I reminded my in-laws to do their daily exercise (zuò cāo / 做操) I said the second word with a 4th (falling) tone instead of a 1st (high) tone, thus telling them not to exercise (操) but to fuck (肏). Oops!
(Fortunately they are too cultured to hear it that way and/or too polite to correct me.)
@mcmullin
Perhaps younger generations have a better sense of pitch (as a whole—there would still be outliers) thanks to being exposed from an early age to music that was perfectly in-tune.
@KydiaMusic
I doubt that, to be honest. And is bang-on 12-tone equal temperament really more in tune? Choirs and string quartets etc spend a lot of rehearsal time tweaking each chord to sound best by departing subtly from the pitches a DAW would recognize as correct.
I’m nerdy about this stuff but tuning is fascinating. @johncarlosbaez has some excellent threads about it.
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