musicalman
Well-Known Member
Hi all,
I'm new here, but I hope I will have a great time reading and having discussion on this forum! Hopefully it will be an outlet for me to explore some things I have been struggling with for years, and will bring me some perspective. Oh, and sorry for the long post!
I am a blind musician/tech geek. I don't know exactly what if any diagnosis I could be given that could most accurately describe me. Definitely not neurotypical or otherwise normal... Probably Aspergers but I don't know. Nobody seems to take me seriously when I bring up the possibility, but always telling me I'm simply different. nothing worth getting worried about. I've also been told that I have no reason to self-diagnose. Meh. The most common reason is that I seem so functional... why should I be concerned that I have any disorder? Yeah I can see that, but I'm really good at learning a script for different situations and the only way I can keep up appearances is to learn immitation and rules like a checklist. Then I have to learn the exceptions to those rules and actually ask people if I'm right. Pretty much case-by-case. Am I allowed to... is a phrase people will hear me use all too often. And my blindness might explain part of it. Stimming, fidgeting, social difficulties, maybe even constant emotional oversensitivity/anxiety or awkwardness. But not really the obsessive interests or qwerkiness.
Ever since I was a kid I've been aware of the presence of Synesthesia, which is a crosswiring of senses. IN my case, sound and texture are linked in weird ways. I can hear a sound and it will associate with a texture, or I can feel a texture and hear a sound in my head to go along with it. Often these associations are most vivid in my dreams. Which makes sense because in order to be really vivid, it has to be something subconscious. Maybe because as a child I never found an outlet for it so I repressed it. When I was little they used to be so strong that I would literally be driven out of certain situations in a complete meltdown simply because of the rough texture of something on my shirt. Because rough textures sounded like the things I feared as a kid: lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, giant fans, anything loud and low-pitched.
It's not all unpleasant, however. I like the texture of water, glass, smooth metal, etc. I don't feel it obsessively but I enjoy it when I come across it. Also certain buttons are really cool, the keys on mechanical keyboards for instance. I'm typing on one right now. and well my synesthesia has, on multiple occasions, gotten me infatuated with girls. Simply because on a casual physical contact (briefly touching hands or something similar) their skin texture, which I have always been oversensitive to, sends the ground out from under me for a second. Sometimes way longer. I dunno, maybe part of that is from being blind since I've heard that a fair number of blind people share that. I know several who do. Being aspie though makes it so much more intense at times.
I also think part of being aspie might share a lot with retention and focus. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with a learning deficit, though it was never given a name and wasn't really talked about at any depth. For reasons which I really shouldn't discuss, I had to undergo a psychological evaluation and was told of the deficit months later. A lot of people would dismiss that as the psychologist doesn't know what he's talking about, but for me the finding made sense. Basically I only remember things that I can systemize, and or that I can somehow make important enough to code into something that'll stick. If you give me a sequence of as few as four numbers and ask me 10 seconds later to tell you what it was, I might not remember one digit, especially if I'm even a little distracted. I'd say if I really want to make sure I remember something, it has to be out of literal form and in some abstract representation within 5 seconds at most, or it's pretty much just gone. The more often I encode, decode, re-encode, over and over, the more it sticks. But if items aren't chunked in groups of 2, 3 or 4, without sufficient space between chunks to allow me to remember, I'm at a real disadvantage. So with 16 items to remember during the test at the evaluation, it didn't go so well. I only remembered maybe 3 of the 16 things, compared to the supposedly normal 7/16 on first run. With repetition I did improve, but not as fast as they thought I should. I could barely remember half the items on my fourth run (IIRC I only got 6). This isn't something I desperately needed to know to live my life, since even the psychologist agreed that I compensate so well that there's nothing to be said about it really. But it fascinates me, since it hints at why I struggled so much in many subjects in school. The more complex the information becomes, and the less I can connect with it, the more magnified my focus and retention problems become. The more I lose site of what's important, the further and faster I fall, and combine that with information coming too quickly and... I've got myself a real problem. Lol
The flip side, though, is that if I can latch onto something, get it in there somehow, I can remember it far better than the average person I think. I'm not freaky with dates or memorizing pi to 20,000 places, but I can retain abstract concepts, like shapes, sounds, texture etc. and when required, decode that into a literal representation quickly with my cinesthesia. Which ties in nicely to my aspie interests: music, and technology.
I started messing around with toy organs and keyboards when I was 2, and that is where my interest in musical things started. When I was 4 I started taking piano lessons with a teacher who was mostly rock/jazz/pop oriented, which is where I learned a lot of basic music theory. I didn't retain any of the theory though, I just liked listening to the different sounds produced. I.e. putting this and that on top of that, and getting the shapes down in my head, not the literal meanings of them. When I was 10 I moved to taking classical piano lessons, but found them to not fit with my abstract but organic way of coding texture and sound. Too much focus on a rounded sort of rigidness. I love classical, and would like to become better at playing and studying it, but it will never be a primary thing. So I started gravitating toward jazz. For a while I didn't know how to approach it because the structure was gone (jazz is mostly improvisation with often just basic structures to keep everyone together), and without structure I turn into a ball of overloads pretty quickly. But because I did this on my own time, I soon could relax and just experiment. Which is ironic considering I'm afraid to do just that with anything else. But in this case it feels so refreshing for me, knowing that my ears and synesthesia can guide me through a very subconscious evolving landscape that is never the same. I can't even begin to describe it in meaningful terms.
Until I was a teenager I had very little exposure to electronic music and synthesizers, though I was always fascinated with them and wanted to know more about how they worked and how I could use them to express the ideas I had. At one point, I decided I might as well pursue this interest. I was tired of limiting myself to the piano, there were textures which it could only imitate, not produce. Besides, I didn't really want to be a famous blind piano player because I was always compared to blind and sighted pianists as I grew up. So I've started playing with keyboards and synthesizers over the past decade or so. I love EDM, funk, rock, metal, jazz, symphonic music, and many other genres. I've also taken a great interest in sound design in a musical context, and I even greatly enjoy working with old sound chips for video games (mainly nes and snes at the moment). My upbringing on acoustic sounds has never left me, so I always strive for a larger than life, organic but electronic sound when I compose, which at present I only do for a hobby as motivational issues get in the way. However I don't really listen to lyrics, which I know a lot of people are going to find hard to process, since lyrics is a huge part of most modern music. And I'm not a music collector or anything. I look for very specific qualities in the music I listen to and hang onto them for a long time. Half the time I don't even know, nor do I have a desire to find out, who wrote what I'm listening to.
Random other facts: I recently went to York College of Pennsylvania where I graduated in May 2016 with a Masters degree in Music Industry and Recording Technology. I've started playing in bands in the area I live, mostly in bars, restaurants, etc. I also recently started volunteering as an access Technology person, basically working with blind people who are having trouble with the technology they use to communicate with the sighted world. It by no means trumps musical things but I enjoy it, despite the plethora of tests given to my coping mechanisms because a lot of people really do test my patience. Lol
Few, that's enough for now I think. I definitely would call myself an interesting person. If you think you're an interesting person too, and you think I'd be interesting, by all means approach. I don't bite, not even when I probably should...
I'm new here, but I hope I will have a great time reading and having discussion on this forum! Hopefully it will be an outlet for me to explore some things I have been struggling with for years, and will bring me some perspective. Oh, and sorry for the long post!
I am a blind musician/tech geek. I don't know exactly what if any diagnosis I could be given that could most accurately describe me. Definitely not neurotypical or otherwise normal... Probably Aspergers but I don't know. Nobody seems to take me seriously when I bring up the possibility, but always telling me I'm simply different. nothing worth getting worried about. I've also been told that I have no reason to self-diagnose. Meh. The most common reason is that I seem so functional... why should I be concerned that I have any disorder? Yeah I can see that, but I'm really good at learning a script for different situations and the only way I can keep up appearances is to learn immitation and rules like a checklist. Then I have to learn the exceptions to those rules and actually ask people if I'm right. Pretty much case-by-case. Am I allowed to... is a phrase people will hear me use all too often. And my blindness might explain part of it. Stimming, fidgeting, social difficulties, maybe even constant emotional oversensitivity/anxiety or awkwardness. But not really the obsessive interests or qwerkiness.
Ever since I was a kid I've been aware of the presence of Synesthesia, which is a crosswiring of senses. IN my case, sound and texture are linked in weird ways. I can hear a sound and it will associate with a texture, or I can feel a texture and hear a sound in my head to go along with it. Often these associations are most vivid in my dreams. Which makes sense because in order to be really vivid, it has to be something subconscious. Maybe because as a child I never found an outlet for it so I repressed it. When I was little they used to be so strong that I would literally be driven out of certain situations in a complete meltdown simply because of the rough texture of something on my shirt. Because rough textures sounded like the things I feared as a kid: lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, giant fans, anything loud and low-pitched.
It's not all unpleasant, however. I like the texture of water, glass, smooth metal, etc. I don't feel it obsessively but I enjoy it when I come across it. Also certain buttons are really cool, the keys on mechanical keyboards for instance. I'm typing on one right now. and well my synesthesia has, on multiple occasions, gotten me infatuated with girls. Simply because on a casual physical contact (briefly touching hands or something similar) their skin texture, which I have always been oversensitive to, sends the ground out from under me for a second. Sometimes way longer. I dunno, maybe part of that is from being blind since I've heard that a fair number of blind people share that. I know several who do. Being aspie though makes it so much more intense at times.
I also think part of being aspie might share a lot with retention and focus. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with a learning deficit, though it was never given a name and wasn't really talked about at any depth. For reasons which I really shouldn't discuss, I had to undergo a psychological evaluation and was told of the deficit months later. A lot of people would dismiss that as the psychologist doesn't know what he's talking about, but for me the finding made sense. Basically I only remember things that I can systemize, and or that I can somehow make important enough to code into something that'll stick. If you give me a sequence of as few as four numbers and ask me 10 seconds later to tell you what it was, I might not remember one digit, especially if I'm even a little distracted. I'd say if I really want to make sure I remember something, it has to be out of literal form and in some abstract representation within 5 seconds at most, or it's pretty much just gone. The more often I encode, decode, re-encode, over and over, the more it sticks. But if items aren't chunked in groups of 2, 3 or 4, without sufficient space between chunks to allow me to remember, I'm at a real disadvantage. So with 16 items to remember during the test at the evaluation, it didn't go so well. I only remembered maybe 3 of the 16 things, compared to the supposedly normal 7/16 on first run. With repetition I did improve, but not as fast as they thought I should. I could barely remember half the items on my fourth run (IIRC I only got 6). This isn't something I desperately needed to know to live my life, since even the psychologist agreed that I compensate so well that there's nothing to be said about it really. But it fascinates me, since it hints at why I struggled so much in many subjects in school. The more complex the information becomes, and the less I can connect with it, the more magnified my focus and retention problems become. The more I lose site of what's important, the further and faster I fall, and combine that with information coming too quickly and... I've got myself a real problem. Lol
The flip side, though, is that if I can latch onto something, get it in there somehow, I can remember it far better than the average person I think. I'm not freaky with dates or memorizing pi to 20,000 places, but I can retain abstract concepts, like shapes, sounds, texture etc. and when required, decode that into a literal representation quickly with my cinesthesia. Which ties in nicely to my aspie interests: music, and technology.
I started messing around with toy organs and keyboards when I was 2, and that is where my interest in musical things started. When I was 4 I started taking piano lessons with a teacher who was mostly rock/jazz/pop oriented, which is where I learned a lot of basic music theory. I didn't retain any of the theory though, I just liked listening to the different sounds produced. I.e. putting this and that on top of that, and getting the shapes down in my head, not the literal meanings of them. When I was 10 I moved to taking classical piano lessons, but found them to not fit with my abstract but organic way of coding texture and sound. Too much focus on a rounded sort of rigidness. I love classical, and would like to become better at playing and studying it, but it will never be a primary thing. So I started gravitating toward jazz. For a while I didn't know how to approach it because the structure was gone (jazz is mostly improvisation with often just basic structures to keep everyone together), and without structure I turn into a ball of overloads pretty quickly. But because I did this on my own time, I soon could relax and just experiment. Which is ironic considering I'm afraid to do just that with anything else. But in this case it feels so refreshing for me, knowing that my ears and synesthesia can guide me through a very subconscious evolving landscape that is never the same. I can't even begin to describe it in meaningful terms.
Until I was a teenager I had very little exposure to electronic music and synthesizers, though I was always fascinated with them and wanted to know more about how they worked and how I could use them to express the ideas I had. At one point, I decided I might as well pursue this interest. I was tired of limiting myself to the piano, there were textures which it could only imitate, not produce. Besides, I didn't really want to be a famous blind piano player because I was always compared to blind and sighted pianists as I grew up. So I've started playing with keyboards and synthesizers over the past decade or so. I love EDM, funk, rock, metal, jazz, symphonic music, and many other genres. I've also taken a great interest in sound design in a musical context, and I even greatly enjoy working with old sound chips for video games (mainly nes and snes at the moment). My upbringing on acoustic sounds has never left me, so I always strive for a larger than life, organic but electronic sound when I compose, which at present I only do for a hobby as motivational issues get in the way. However I don't really listen to lyrics, which I know a lot of people are going to find hard to process, since lyrics is a huge part of most modern music. And I'm not a music collector or anything. I look for very specific qualities in the music I listen to and hang onto them for a long time. Half the time I don't even know, nor do I have a desire to find out, who wrote what I'm listening to.
Random other facts: I recently went to York College of Pennsylvania where I graduated in May 2016 with a Masters degree in Music Industry and Recording Technology. I've started playing in bands in the area I live, mostly in bars, restaurants, etc. I also recently started volunteering as an access Technology person, basically working with blind people who are having trouble with the technology they use to communicate with the sighted world. It by no means trumps musical things but I enjoy it, despite the plethora of tests given to my coping mechanisms because a lot of people really do test my patience. Lol
Few, that's enough for now I think. I definitely would call myself an interesting person. If you think you're an interesting person too, and you think I'd be interesting, by all means approach. I don't bite, not even when I probably should...
