website/content/posts/i-dont-like-musical-instruments.md

title	date	description	type	tags
I Don't Like Musical Instruments	2023-07-06T04:54:55Z	Why I like music but dislike musical instruments	post	music life rant controversial

Musical instruments suck. Now, I assure you that I'm a completely normal person who likes music just as much as everyone else. But musical instruments, on the other hand, are a particularly ingenious form of torture.

You've seen all these people happily playing musical instruments with easy, and you're like, yeah, that doesn't look too bad. And then six months later after intensive practice, you can't even play a decent-sounding note. And then you have to grind tedious scales and drills for years until your soul shrivels up from boredom. And you're drowning in your instrument's weird quirks and your friend asks you how it's going and you nod and smile but secretly deep down your heart segfaults.

Now you're probably going to start victim-blaming me and complaining that I don't have the willpower and mental strength to survive hundreds of hours or scales and practicing the same piece a million times. Now let me ask you this: if I came up to you and asked if you would rather play a scale infinity times on a musical instrument or dress up in a ridiculous IHOP mascot waffle costume for 86 years, you'd probably choose the waffle thing. I meant pancakes. Whatever.

And the worst part is, you could use any app for composing scores and create something in an hour that sounds way better than anything you could ever play on an instrument. All those years of practice, and all you become is a subpar automaton for converting sheet music into sound that a robot could do way better at.

Some people like to claim that computers can't play music "with emotion". Honestly, who cares? How do humans play music "with emotion"? Well, they do things like change the dynamics or add vibrato or whatever, but those are all things you can make your computer do too.

We have technology for a reason: to make our lives slightly less miserable. Playing a musical instrument is like riding a horse. 200 years ago, if you wanted to get from point A to point B, the best way to do it would be to hop on a horse and ride it. Very practically useful, right? But now, we have cars and trains and planes and electric bicycles and so on, so there's no longer any practical value in riding a horse for most people. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't ride a horse, because maybe you find it fun or you like horses, but it's not an important skill.

Same with musical instruments. 200 years ago, we didn't have computers or CD players or record players or any form of technology to automatically reproduce sounds, so being able to play a musical instrument was actually very useful. But now, we have all this technology, so practicing the same piece for a million times is no longer important unless you want to win a recital competition. Still, if you genuinely enjoy doing that or if you think it's a lot of fun to play your favorite instrument, that's fine too. Whenever I play an instrument, I find it pretty enjoyable, but that's because I like music and the instrument is just a huge annoyance that gets in the way.

OK, enough ranting about why the status quo sucks. Now what should we do instead?

A musical instrument is just an imperfect mechanism to convert sounds in your brain into sounds in the real world. So thus, musical instruments are always going to be useful when you have some sounds that you want to interactively produce right now, such as when improvising. And also, we don't have to limit ourselves to typical instruments, since we have all these fancy computers nowadays. For me, my ideal musical instrument would be a microphone that I could sing or hum into, and it would extract my desired pitch and play that pitch out of a speaker. Maybe this already exists.

And what about musical education? Instead of having kids spend years in frustration learning a cumbersome instrument, it might be better to have them play around with apps for composing scores and see what they can create. When you play music from a score, you aren't really creating anything. You're just playing music that's already been created and written down. To truly create, you have to compose music, which fortunately is easy with modern computers.

So honestly, my conclusion isn't really even that radical: instead of focusing on practicing playing pieces to perfection, we should instead emphasize composing and improvising. After all, we have to technology now to make it fun and easy, so why not? Music is amazing, and we shouldn't let the frustration of instruments ruin that.