bits of dead cat
I feel like I’m missing a huge part of music lore.
Comment on Truly Lossless Music
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.
People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man. Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightning opera scores.
In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.
bits of dead cat
I feel like I’m missing a huge part of music lore.
Violin strings, and other bowed string instruments, were traditionally, and some still, made with livestock intestines. They’re called catgut strings, they’re not actually made from cat intestines, but the name has lead to the common belief that they are made from cats. I’ve been told by people who use them that they resonate better and they like the tone.
Besides the string, some instruments used cat skins as covering, like the shamisen :
pictures-of-cats.org/japanese-banjo-shamisen-made…
community.bachido.com/t/…/2621
Strings for stringed instruments were at one point traditionally made out of “catgut,” which is animal intestinal material. Though to my knowledge, pretty much never actually from cats.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
But remember, autism wasn’t invented until 10 years ago.
CarrierLost@infosec.pub 1 day ago
You know this is an excerpt from a fiction story written by Terry Pratchett, right? This isn’t about a real person.
First_Thunder@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
The implication being that it was Terry Pratchett who created autism
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Autism is stored in the hat
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Based