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Megan Gafford's avatar

I don't play any instruments, so I know musicians must hear beauty inaccessible to me even though it's right before my ears!

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Flummery's avatar

I wouldn’t say that a musician feels music more than every other human feels it, but to play a song with your own hands is a way of communing with the song. I sometimes play a small musical phrase slowly and over and over. You could compare that to lingering over a line in a drawing. (Though people who create or learn a craft are more likely to have felt it more to begin with.)

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Megan Gafford's avatar

I don't know about "feels" it, but I think someone who can create music literally hears better than me. And just as I wasn't referring to what optometrists measure in the essay, I also don't mean hearing well as in functioning ears — neither glasses nor hearing aids can help someone see or hear better in this sense. But I can tell that people who are trained in music notice things about what we're listening to that I simply can't identify. I don't "have an ear" for it, I can't pick it out. It's just beyond my comprehension. Similarly, people who can't draw literally cannot see everything they look at. They just don't know how to absorb all the visual information.

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Flummery's avatar

I agree with all of that. Just needed to separate out feeling music from hearing the bits that make up the whole (or mostly so).

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Sam Kahn's avatar

Totally. I can't draw a thing and it's terrible! I suspect life is much better if you have this. Lovely piece!

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