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Back when some people thought emotion was inherent in the various musical keys of Western music.

Tag yourself; I'm F minor.

@KydiaMusic
Bb minor or maybe one of the 7 missing keys.

@mcmullin

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

@KydiaMusic @mcmullin I truly admire people who can make sense out of that gibberish.

It's totally me. I never got music. Notes are like ancient Egyptian algebra to me.

@chris @mcmullin

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.

@KydiaMusic @mcmullin oh yes. Poor wording. I listen to music and like it. Very broad range, too.

I just don't get the process from taking an empty sheet of paper to beautiful music. Every step in there escapes me.

@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…😬

I don’t know why she was a music major, tbh!

@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.

Cat Lady Kydia Music

@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?

@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.

@KydiaMusic @chris
Yes, “tone deaf” is a colloquial insult more than a specific condition, and people say it to mean a variety of things. Pitch discrimination, like many things, is something where natural ability and potential varies from person to person, but it’s a skill that can be improved with effort.

And this has nothing to do with “perfect pitch,” which is just the ability to name notes out of context. (Some say that’s trainable too.)