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[TimC]

Back in the eighties, I decided to teach myself the fiddle. I bought a student instrument and a couple beginner books.
One day I was sawing on it, making a sound like you would hear if you castrated a tomcat with a piece of broken glass. An old-timer neighbor was out walking and knocked on the door. He came in and asked if he could try the fiddle.
He tuned it a bit and proceeded to produce what I thought was a masterful classical solo. When he finished, I told him how great I thought it sounded. He said both his playing and my fiddle sounded like s***. I found out in his younger days, he'd been a violinist for the St. Louis Philharmonic until he'd shattered a finger on his left hand in an accident. This caused some lingering numbness in the tip of the finger, which was enough to end his music career.
I realized then that right-brained mechanical types like me didn't hear music the same as left-brained artists. I ditched the fiddle soon after that.

[nasum]

I did something very similar to what you describe once. Only the sound I made sounded like beating a goose with a baseball bat full of rusty nails...

Anywho

I've always been curious about the more "scientific/mathematical" portion of music. Every now and then you hear of something like your old man there. People who have some malady or another and either give up playing or invent a new way of getting around it. That one blind guy that played slide on a strat comes to mind. Would he be as much of a slide player had he not been blind. Or would he have gone and did the whole Jeff Beck thing that so many fail miserably at?
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symphones of sickness,melodies of universal malice