It reminds a bit of musicians tracking rhythm. You can somehow feel a beat after a bit practice even when not directly paying attention to it and it's not too hard to associate it with an increasing counter (somehow). It sounds hard, but it is quite doable.
yeah, doesn't the multitasking in this thread feel a little bit like what i imagine playing the drums is like? i've done some low-key drum-playing sorts of musical things in my life, and it was the disconnection point when you genuinely had 2-3 different things to focus on at once that i found my brain to be lacking. i observed the same with piano, but i had much more of a knack for piano, so it was only the rare song that genuinely required tracking three things at once... and those kinds of songs are hard enough for most mortals that people just pin them all as "dw those songs are super hard", when in reality it always felt like that specific skill was the thing that was lacking, and besides rote memorization i never found some way to lick it all the time. when i was really in flow, though, it would be completely effortless. it's bizarre.
> You can somehow feel a beat
If you play in an orchestra, you might have the visual memory of the conductor and their time signature motions helping you along.
The somewhat jarring tick tock of a digital metronome can also be encoded into a sort of background track that plays more or less automatically in your head.
> If you play in an orchestra, you might have the visual memory of the conductor and their time signature motions helping you along.
Or on the other side of the spectrum, most DJs learn to "feel" beat counting and phrases, more or less by feeling. After a while, your head kind of goes "1,2,3,4" by itself, and the phrases of the songs "feels" like they're about to come, then they come.
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