the Lost & Unfound : my diary

.31.

<31.1.24>

It's currently 10:58pm on a Wednesday, and I was playing around on my piano around 5 minutes ago. But, for a good 10 minutes, I just sat there and had a whole conversation to myself as if I was trying to explain something to somebody, but I was just talking to a wall and staring at my piano keys.

It was a good conversation I had with myself. I learnt something new just by talking to myself, which is something that isn't uncommon for me, and happens quite frequently. It's therapeutic.

While I was playing, I was thinking about the fact that I can't sight read sheet music and that because I don't use sheet music, I learn by ear. When I tell people that, they see it as me being very 'talented' or 'intelligent', when in fact I think the opposite and I've always thought it was a bad thing and that I was just 'lazy' and 'stupid' because I didn't know how to read sheet music at all. As a matter of fact, both of these statements are not always true.

What I didn't know a while ago, was that learning pieces of music or songs is just like studying any other subject. People have preferences for what study methods they like to use when studying, and it's the same for music. Some like to use flash cards and others like to take pretty notes with pictures and diagrams to absorb information— and as for music, some like to use sheet music and others like to learn by listening to the music to understand how to play it.

As of recently when I got diagnosed with ADHD, I've found from doing my own research that having ADHD was probably linked to why I really couldn't read sheet music properly. Firstly, because reading any texts in general takes me a longer time to comprehend and secondly, multitasking is extremely difficult for my ADHD brain and it becomes extremely difficult to focus on more than two things at once for an extended period of time. So, trying to play piano and read sheet music is just an absolute pain for me, and my self-esteem was so low because so many other people can do it but I couldn't do it even on my best day. In the end, I just end up memorising a whole piece of music by heart, not because I'm 'smarter' but it's because it's the only way I'm able to learn and understand what I'm playing— but others don't realise that at all.

Back to recently, while I was playing piano, I had a thought that popped into my head. I had wondered, 'Do people see music differently to me?'.

It sounds like a stupid question because obviously it would be 'yes' in the sense that everybody is different and views things differently. But from my experience, when I teach somebody how to play something on piano, I notice that they all think similarly.

Those who I've tried to teach, all have had some extent of being taught traditionally by a teacher. I'm not sure how to describe it, but their view of how music works seems so ordered, rigid, and just a list of code that produces a good sound in the end. They don't seem to pick up the pattern of the melodies as quickly as I thought they would.

Then that's when I realised that maybe I view music extremely differently from them in a way. When I play piano, my main focus is on the piano because I don't have sheet music. And people must wonder how I memorise the music without having it in front of me, but they don't realise that the music IS in front of me.

When I play the first couple of notes, it's like a cue for me to play the next note, or the next chord, or the next progression. With every single chord and melody I play, I see a full image, a pattern, a shape, a flow— and for me, the music is just like any other creative work with a storyline and a introduction, a climax, a resolution. Everything about it is visual, and even what I hear is visual with the rises and falls, the crescendos and decrescendos. I've always been a visual learner, and long threads of words or information are meaningless, to me at least.

But, in the end, we're all able to produce something beautiful and appreciate it, and that's what I really love about the arts. I'm able to express things that I can't put into real words, and I can communicate meanings that even I don't understand but the music seems to make me understand.

It is now 11:35pm, and I'm kind of proud for what I have discovered today. It is one of those moments where I'm truly able to appreciate myself for the little things I find. It's a nice way to end the first month of this year :)

—Yuna