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

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.