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For me it's time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don't understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That's it. I don't understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn't give you anything.

My wife will hear a song and go "Oh neat, it's in 5/8." And I'm like "How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?"

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[โ€“] ArtVandelay@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Time signatures fuck with my head too. I'm not a pianist, but I decided to try and learn Gabriel Faure's Clair de Lune, which has always been one of my favorite pieces. My whole life I've heard it in my head as 4/4 , but to my surprise it's in 3/4 and the left hand are actually 16th notes with the first one missing in each beat.

[โ€“] carmo55@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 days ago

This is something I've noticed recently which is that a lot of piano pieces are metrically ambiguous because there is no rhythm instrument to anchor the downbeats. There are some songs which I interpret in a different time signature than the author and I don't think you should give the author's vision too much credence in this sense.