Think of a musical instrument

[koganbot]

Think of a musical instrument.

What was the first instrument that crossed your mind when I instructed you just now to think of a musical instrument?

(See comments.)

Comments

[koganbot]

Did anyone think of drums? Rattles? Hands (for hand-clapping)? Feet (for stomping)? Drum machines?

Synthesizers?

Voice? Vocal cords?

Also, if you post an answer here in these comments, say something about yourself that you think might be relevant to why you thought of what you did. E.g., where you grew up, how old you are, what your favorite type of music is (someone into electronic dance may answer differently from someone into string quartets [not that you can't be both]). Or anything else.

[koganbot]

Since I'm the one who gave the instruction, there was no way for a spontaneous image or thought of a particular instrument to cross my mind in response. But I'll bet if someone else had said, "Think of an instrument," either violin or guitar would have been there first — even if someone in the next room were playing a harmonica at the same time, or I were listening to severe techno on the computer.

I was born in Connecticut (east coast USA) in 1954; heritage Jewish, parents intellectuals, their main listening classical; dad played the violin in a university orchestra (though not for a living). I took piano and violin lessons as a child; quit in favor of guitar (unlessoned), when folk and then rock took me over. Picked up bass later; the character of my bass playing was very different from that of my guitar playing. More ebullient, less caustic. Once, over at my friend Patty's apartment, I picked up a small mbira (thumb piano) she had sitting around, and played a three against two rhythm. Patty thought I was a natural for it.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

harpsichord!

Obviously I have 2/3rds of a massive history of music and technology lying unfinished in my flat and have thought about instruments and instrumentation -- and how particular devices for sound creation and manipulation evolve -- a LOT: i think i get to harpsichord because in my head i organise the development of the piano as being exemplary of the cross-over from hand-made to machine-made, and harpsichord comes before piano

[koganbot]

Was curious if John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythm And African Sensibility is also lying around your flat. I think you've mentioned it. I had a copy, but a couple of decades ago it took a short vacation in someone else's apartment, I forget whose, and it never returned. I ask because I have a memory, right or wrong, of Chernoff recalling seeing a lone character approaching in the distance, drum in hand, and the person next to Chernoff saying, "Oh good! Music!" or something of the sort. Chernoff's comment to us, the readers, was that he doubted that in America a single drum* would have gotten that reaction: "Music!"

But I may be misremembering severely.

*With no band or orchestra in sight, that is.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

don't suppose you remember whereabouts in the book it is?

[koganbot]

I'd guess it would be near the start, and I think that's what my memory would tell me. But that might be my "memory" reconstructing where I would expect it to be, as opposed to where it really is.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

found it: yes it's on the very first page if you don't count the introduction (=p.27), but it's not a lone character with a drum, it's a group of drummers

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

GREAT book btw, must reread

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Trumpets, ftb I have Rizzle Kicks' Down With The Trumpets stuck in my head.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Violin - or rather, interestingly, I heard a violin in my head. Normally my mental vision outpaces audition, even when the topic is music.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think I thought about a guitar, but that was probably because I was listening to this. (And, oddly, it was an acoustic guitar!)

Then when I read the post and "Did anyone think of..." I had a rapid succession of images -- piano, violin, and flute, I think. And then I kept reading and thought of drums, handclaps, etc.

The piano is the only instrument that I can actually play. Learned it starting from age 3, when I picked out "Winnie the Pooh" and my parents signed me up for piano lessons with a family friend (a local baker). Moved on to someone well-known in the area to learn from age 5-9, then moved when my dad remarried to a new city in Maryland and learned from a different local teacher. That teacher was concurrently getting her doctorate from U Maryland and was quickly making a name for herself in what was a very competitive piano area (basically suburbs of D.C.).

I started competing at about 7, probably about 20 competitions a year at the height of it (between 10 and 16). I had to dress up in a little grey suit. Remember going to McD's after competitions to eat a 20-piece chicken nugget meal. Was pretty good until I stopped practicing enough to keep up with my peers, sometime around late middle school. This has served as a kind of template for my life -- early success, rest on laurels, slowly fade, start new thing. Sigh.

I probably think of an acoustic guitar because it's my dad's instrument -- he spent my whole childhood playing pieces on guitar. Recently picked it up again and it's always comforting to hear him play when I'm home. Tried to make a film about it once; was only moderately successful (in that I technically finished it).

[koganbot]

This has served as a kind of template for my life -- early success, rest on laurels, slowly fade, start new thing. Sigh.

I don't buy this. Would you really rather be a concert pianist than what you actually are? Not that you can't do both, but aren't you following your genuine inclination when you broaden and grow and let some things slide in favor of others?

I say this in part because (not to oversimplify), one thing that was going on in my years of shooting to be a musician was me trying to evade my talent and my doom, which was that I'm a writer.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I got mopey/self-pitying and used "template." I should use the word fear (one of the big fears about my life, not some inevitable or even valid pattern) one that I know is actually (usually) baseless.

I'm very satisfied with not choosing "classical pianist" as a potential career route, and I also know that I can always pick up piano again if I'm so inclined. It's a talent, but not the right doom for me (which is probably also writer).

[jonathanbogart.livejournal.com]

A long-necked medieval lute, for some reason; Wikipedia suggests the theorbo, though I didn't know the word before I went hunting.

I think when asked about abstractions I tend to default to the earliest instances available to my general knowledge, possibly due to the emphasis on fundamentalism in my earliest philosophical training. Another possibility is that I don't use the term "musical instrument" very often, generally talking about specific instruments; so when I do, it's about novelties that I have to explain to people, like Harry Partch's constructions, and one of my default ways of conceptualizing non-standard (modern) instrumentation is to go back in history to the general types that modern configurations are based on.

[koganbot]

Your reaction is similar to Mark's.

Maybe a better way for me to have asked the question would have been:

"Music!"

What instrument is being played?

What instrument first crossed your mind when I asked, "What instrument is being played?"

Doesn't eliminate the word "instrument," but probably does suppress technical, academic thoughts about "musical instrument." But such phrasing of the question would likely provoke a confused or too creative response, some people jumping to scenes from movies or some immediate exciting event and creating a vision of that. I often like people's creative responses, but I was searching here for an individual's most typical response.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Whoa, when I read "Music!" I imagined a kind of clip art image of guitar, bass, drums, lots of exclamation points in my mind. Not sure if there was a clip art piano in there.

[jonathanbogart.livejournal.com]

When I read "Music!" I actually imagined some kind of club setting. So the instrument would be a sound system? A DJ? An infinite number of electronic bits representing all the potential sounds that could be played?

[koganbot]

And "being played" might push responses in a certain direction, maybe towards big instruments where the hands are doing the bulk of the handling.

Drums (think of a musical instrument)

[(Anonymous)]

I responded to this briefly on Tumblr. I'm 46 years of age, live in the UK and have been listening to a lot of different genres of music. Drumming seems to be the most primal expression of music, and everything begins, in my humble opinion, with the voice or the body. Drumming seems to be the first departure from that, using a stretched skin over a hollow cylinder to amplify the beats from bare hands or tools fashioned for the purpose. It's as if we're hardwired to respond to rhythm. What my response might say about me or my understanding of music seems vague, but when I clicked through to here from Tumblr and read your post, it seems as though my response was not entirely unexpected.

Re: Drums (think of a musical instrument)

[koganbot]

I was hoping for such a response — drum! — but I wasn't necessarily expecting it.

I expect most readers here are from the westernized middle-class, or some bohemian sidestep or offshoot of it (even if they've long fallen out of the middle class financially). And, unless they were embedded early in African American or African European culture, most who are my age, or your age, probably connect the word "instrument" to a primal sense of melodies and songs rather than beats or tones or counterrhythms — even if as kids we clapped along, and even if since then we've partially Africanized or discofied our understandings.

So you are a happy challenge to my expectation.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

French horn. I played horn in my high school band. It's also the instrument that gets used as decoration on, like, Christmas trees and so on.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I'm 27, from New Jersey, my mom's a Jewish-American environmental justice lawyer representing the State against developers and my dad's a Macedonian-American labor lawyer representing employees against employers. I grew up in a mostly African-American neighborhood.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I'm at the stage of life where many, many introductory conversations are had, and "What do you play?" always comes up when they learn I play, so any close variation of the question will cause the mental-muscle-memory response to trigger, and "percussion" will spring to the tongue, perhaps before I even think it.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Ukulele! But I'm afraid that was because the LJ icon immediately under yours was someone holding a uke/banjo, and the "eyes" have it (ha... ha...).

[koganbot]