Complex Numbers

No Music in Me

https://aeon.co/essays/you-are-a-remarkable-musical-expert-you-just-don-t-know-i...

Twenty years ago, a pair of psychologists hooked up a shoe to a computer. They were trying to teach it to tap in time with a national anthem. However, the job was proving much tougher than anticipated. Just moving to beat-dominated music, they found, required a grasp of tonal organisation and musical structure that seemed beyond the reach of an ordinary person without special training. But how could that be?

...But the more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a startling sense. The difference between a virtuoso performer and an ordinary music fan is much smaller than the gulf between that fan and someone with no musical knowledge at all.

Yeah. I'm going to have to call bullshit on this.

I spent my childhood learning to play piano. I learned music theory and how to read music.

I spent most of high school playing the violin. Again - theory and sheet music.

All my life, I've sung. Usually this has the effect of making people go away. Often, this is the goal.

I spent time as an adult learning guitar: chords, tabs, etc.

Believe me, the one thing I wish I could do would be to play something by ear. But I can't. Whenever I try to get beyond the technical aspects of music, I'm utterly useless. It's like - I'll hit a chord, and try to guess at the next chord by ear, and I just. Can't. Do. It.

This is maddening to me, because I love music, and I just can't make it.

So maybe the article is bullshit. Maybe I'm an outlier. But all this has done is make me feel even worse about myself.