How many of you are musical? | Hacker News Reader

How many of you are musical?

1 pointjrwoodruff12 comments

I watched a PBS special last night that looked at how music is ingrained in the human experience, and how our taste for music is mathematically integrated with the physics of music. Made me wonder: How many hackers play an instrument or are otherwise musically inclined? Please vote up a choice and post what, if any, instrument(s) you play.

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Music is quite literally the universal language. It brings people together, and allows now only the musician to express themselves, but also the listener. Music can be completely in a foreign language, but we listen, and can love it because the rythem and the beat are universal, and can be subject to interpretation. The same music can mean different things to many different people.

Many sites out there, myspace music, itunes, indaba and more, have developed successful music sites. But they have dropped the ball in numerous areas. And are not doing the musically inclinded or the musically interested justice.

I thought one of the most interesting part of the PBS piece was a study where they took clips of classical music recordings to a tribe in west Africa that had never been exposed to music outside what they played in their tribe and asked them to identify whether it was happy, sad or scary. Despite never being exposed to western instruments, chords or rhythms, they were able to identify the emotion in the same way any western person would.

Music is truly universal, maybe more so than math as music and rhythm seems to be built-in to our physical makeup, whereas math must be taught.

I would like to learn to play an instrument/sing

Ha! Missed that. Thanks for the link.

Side note - I notice I gave myself negative points for trying to setup a poll-type submission. Is there a proper way to setup a poll on here, or am I just too much of a noob to be able to do that?

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

There is a min karma threshold to create a poll, so you may not qualify (especially after this debacle :) ).

Yea... lesson learned. Thanks for the link!

I do not play an instrument or sing

I sing in the shower

I play one instrument

I play multiple instruments

I play in a band/sing in a choir

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