Though if OP is thinking about getting a piano to learn to play, I'd honestly recommend just getting a budget/used digital piano over an old secondhand acoustic piano. Almost every old/secondhand piano I've ever played has been in dire need of tuning, and the action on many of them always seems to be incredibly inconsistent - some keys are fine, some take WAY more energy to press from that one time someone spilled a soda down the front and got the mechanisms sticky, some keys are just dead and won't press at all, and almost all the keys are loose and wiggle side to side. They're fine if you already have a baseline of skill (and want a project piano to clean up/tune), but they can promote some bad habits in beginners. Even if you're not spending $400+ for a nicer new digital keyboard with weighted keys, I still think it's better to learn on something with a consistent action and sound.

All of that aside, digital pianos also have the benefit of a headphone jack and are way more neighbor-friendly if OP is in an apartment/flat or shares walls/lives super close to the neighbors.

Lmao what? They…literally said they get two paychecks a month, why are you trying to turn this into an argument lol?

Lol ok, but I wasn’t commenting on what’s normal in different places, I was just explaining how a bi-weekly payment schedule can result in 3 checks a month.

They get paid bi-weekly (once every 2 weeks) rather than semi-monthly (twice a month, usually the 15th and either the 1st or 31st), so occasionally the offset lines up and gives you three checks in a month (e.g. your payday falls on the 1st, second payday on the 15th, third on the 29th).

Though this isn't a news article and is instead a press release/blog post from DeepMind themselves, so makes sense that they're trying to drive clicks to their own website with hyperbole about their own tech.

But it never claimed to be a double blind study? Not all experiments are double blind…hell, not all experiments are even single blind.

Well if I've learned one thing from living in the world of professional musicians and musical scholars, there's always someone who's put in more work, is more naturally talented, or a combination of both. In this particular example of "random music knowledge", I know at least two people with an encyclopedic knowledge of virtually every piece of recorded music in the past century - one is a production professor with 40 years of experience touring, running live sound, and producing albums for everyone from Dave Matthews to the Tallis Scholars, the other is a music historian and jazz pianist who makes it a habit to listen to every version of a piece he's going to play (along with the full discography of that artist just so he can have an "informed background" on why they did it that way) while keeping up to date with everything from post-hardcore prog rock to alt-pop and hip hop because "you never know what'll help."

If you haven't met anyone yet who can challenge your knowledge, just go out and meet more people - you'll find them eventually.

Probably the same way I memorized the full score of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique or performed Escamillo in Carmen or arranged/composed 100+ songs for various jazz/vocal/rock/indie/etc ensembles lol - with a bit of time and effort. I'm very happy for you that you're so proud of yourself for having an eclectic musical knowledge, but you're far from the only person in this world (or even on this website) who does.

I hate to break it to you, but there are thousands (likely more) of people out there in this world with a deeper and more complete knowledge of music and musicians than you'll ever have. Maybe I'm one of them, maybe I'm not, but the fact that you haven't met someone like that is in no way proof that you never will, nor is it proof that they don't exist and you're the king of musical knowledge.

probably don't even know the words to their famous song "smells like toon sprite"

THERE'S the age remark haha, knew it was only a matter of time. When you're done pushing conversations off track with fallacious arguments maybe we can talk, but you seem like an absolute headache so probably not.

Lmao this coming from a guy that probably doesn't even know who Pearl Jam is. Get on my level sweetheart.

Oh yeah I totally believe you, internet stranger with no proof of their habits and no compelling evidence other than "well I'm telling you that none of the people I know has spent as much time as I have not working and consuming media, so obviously you couldn't have either".

Like I said, this is an exercise in futility lol. Thanks for proving me right!

I am literally a musician and production engineer with multiple degrees in the field and over a decade of professional experience, don't default to such a lazy assumption about how much music I listen to in order to start a useless pissing contest to try to change the subject.

I'm sure next you'll just say that a decade of working in the field is nothing, and that because you're far older than me I don't really understand music like your generation does and still ignore the point that literally all of this is based on assumptions you've made.

It honestly just feels like you've got a pretty limited view of "musicians" and are just running off of an assumption you've made based on the music you listen to specifically (and interviews with those artists), rather than the wider world of music as a whole.

I can keep listing intelligent musicians for you (hell, take literally anyone from the album I'm currently listening to and they'll all tick that "intelligent" box, as well as articulate, which is apparently more important to you - album is Goat Rodeo Sessions with Chris Thile, Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Stuart Duncan), but reading your other comments it seems like it would be an exercise in futility.

So what, you're limiting your pool of "musicians" to modern musicians you've heard give interviews? No classical/broadway/film composers? No jazz or classical instrumentalists? No dead musicians?

At the very least go listen to some interviews of modern greats like Sondheim or Bernstein talking music theory/composition/conducting/etc, because they definitely don't come across as unintelligent lol.

Lol since when are musicians considered the least intelligent of those in the arts?

Easy to be the "longest city" when you stretch your city limits to include almost all of a mostly uninhabited state park that's 2/3 the size of Rhode Island lol.

And you know, you don't even have to be a kid to enjoy these things! My family has always been about stretching out Christmas gift opening, and as everyone got older and the general number of gifts dwindled (at least, from when we were kids and would have like 10-15 little-medium toys and one or two "big" gifts) down to a handful of nice things each, we needed something that went beyond one-at-a-time gift opening as a group and started this despite the "kids" being in our 20s at the time. My mom handled all of the clues for the first few years, but then in the last two my siblings and I have started stepping up to do it ourselves and put our own creative spins on it (this year was my year, so I wrote a song that set up a story about an evil elf that escaped from the north pole and stole a bunch of our presents and continued that narrative in longer-form rhyming clues than we normally do).

Like, two of us are already in our 30s with the youngest not far behind, none of us have kids, and we still look forward to it every year. Also helps that once the gifts are found and gathered, we break for mimosas/bloody marys and breakfast before getting into the actual opening. It's just fun to have a Christmas morning that lasts a few hours rather than 5 minutes when people are just tearing into things on their own.

Oh hush, plenty of people get mildly worried/stressed about hosting events for a bunch of people, especially if they’re making everything. Something could go wrong with a recipe (or the timing of multiple dishes if it’s their first time making this much at once), they could be worried about not having their place clean enough yet, there could be some family tension over politics or religion or whatever, or it could just be mild anxiety over how much stuff there is to do…plenty of things to worry about.

And yeah, this absolutely comes off as a brag, congrats on all your experience hosting.

I mean, I’m 32 and have never been suicidal (major depression a few years back yes, but never suicidal)? Plus no lasting/chronic physical pain outside of the occasional gym/exercise injury or a “slept on my back wrong/bad mattress” sorta thing, but I don’t think that’s what the study is talking about.

Love the idea of "macros" for individual words, bc as a solid typist (130-140wpm) that's exactly what it feels like to me when I'm "in the zone" and really pushing. If you can read far enough ahead that you're seeing words and have a sense of the paragraph you're writing (or the paragraph you're trying to say if it's something original you're writing), words on a keyboard are kind of just collections of letters and easy to repeat sequences that you can hammer out within less than a second. It's kinda musical in a way, like you're swapping chords on a guitar or piano, and I envision chords on either instrument pretty much the exact same way - you're just throwing your hands into a default position without really thinking about the specific positions bc you know that this "form" of your hands makes this sound, so you don't have to think about how each finger on each string or key is making its own impact.

Obv this all comes with a lot of practice, and I've gotten a TON of practice typing from the nature of my work, but faster typing is absolutely attainable for anyone that can put in some time practicing.

As a very proficient typist (generally around 130-140 wpm with 98% accuracy, can blast past that if I'm focused in short stretches) that also works in video and has to do a LOT of transcription to caption my work if it's not pre-scripted (most of my work is for the government, so accessibility is required), I've been flirting with the idea of picking up a steno keyboard (or setting up one of my existing keyboards since I can just map it with software) and trying to learn that, especially since I've been doing a lot of live transcription and note-taking in our dnd campaigns. I can generally keep up with slow speakers on a normal keyboard, but fast conversation between 6 people eludes me sometimes if I'm trying to capture actual quotes.

Tbh the DnD is strangely driving me to learn it more than work is, since AI transcription has taken some INSANE jumps recently - with recent updates, I can now have my editing software transcribe a conversation between 3 people (that are well mic'd and assuming none of them have insane accents) and get the result with 99% accuracy, divided by person speaking (e.g. the software recognizes that there are 3 distinct people speaking and sets up the transcription as such, like "Person 1: bla bla", "Person 2: Oh of course blah blah") along with actual grammar/capitalization/etc in a matter of minutes, so all of a sudden I've just been randomly freed of a bunch of onerous busy work, which I don't hate.

For some reason it just seems super cool to me to be able to take down word for word notes as someone's speaking, which is weird, but something that would be fun to follow up on.

After the 37th time in 3 hours that a cat tells us it’s hungry, will we even want to?