abunickabhi
Legend
Previously on this thread, we had discussions about what music people listen to while cubing, https://www.speedsolving.com/threads/discussion-thread-music-and-cubing.3014/. It was a long thread with many people pitching in over the last decade. But we have not had a serious discussion about the relation between cubing and music and they are are correlated with each other, practically or theoretically. In the community, we do have some full time music learners like me, Shawn, Jake, Stanley, Daniel Karnaukh, Vijay Kishore, Jabari, Dana, Ming Ting, Elliott Kobelansky, and many more that I have missed!
Tingman interviewed a few of them, and produced an amazing video trying to dive deep into the topic and understand this aspect better.
Here is my story, I got to Indian classical music and a Rubik's brand 3x3, both at the same time, in the summer of 2008, when I was in my 7th grade. In the Indian classical music I chose the instrument of Tabla, which is a melodic and highly complex and rhythmic percussion instrument played in world music. I learnt the Benares style of Tabla playing, and lots of phrases and composition and time cycles in it which has been passed on for 300 years uninterrupted. Since my learning of music was guided via a teacher, and my learning of cubing was mostly self taught (from badmephisto and cubeloop.com websites), I progressed a bit more in music, as I was able to learn proper technique for Tabla playing from my guru, and I went nowhere with my video taught but self-improved 1TPS LBL solves on a trash Rubik's brand cube.
I had to drop off both the activities a few years later as I had to prepare for the world's toughest entrance exam, IIT-JEE, which is taken by millions each year for only 4000ish spot in India's premier undergraduate institute (super brutal preparation, makes millions of Indians soulless and depressed every year) . Once I started with my undergrad in Chennai, India, I planned on resuming both my activities. The Dayan Zhanchi cube was trending then in 2013, but there were not that many sellers in India, so I had to get one at a very overpriced cost, finally graduating to my first speedcube after spending 5 years with a terrible Rubik's brand. I was able to cube a lot in my undergrad and attend over 35 WCA competitions, but on the other hand, I was unable to resume my playing music, as my college was located in South India, where Carnatic classical music is well known, and the percussion instrument played in Carnatic music, mridangam, is much different from the Tabla. TLDR Tabla is non-existent in south India and hard(rather impossible) to pursue, also video calling and skype was not great back then (low internet bandwidths and bad compression algorithms) , so I could not connect with any North Indian classical artist to get coached online.
Personally, I feel cubing and Indian music are having lot of common aspects (I cannot say for sure for western music though as I am not an expert on it), the phrases and the rhythmic patterns that I improvise and learn in the Tabla, help me chuck my algorithms in cubing better, and learn them faster and more efficiently. As both the drums of the Tabla are a 2D surface whereas a twisty puzzle is a 3D object (as pointed out by pianist Jake in the video's interview), most of fine tuned motor skills that I learn in Tabla do not directly translate over to Cubing. But one thing that I can say for sure is that, when I was on a 4 year hiatus from the Tabla instrument, and only speedcubing in my undergrad, all the cubing practice helped preserve the looseness of the wrist that is required for Tabla playing. When I resumed learning Tabla again in 2018, my teacher was impressed that I had most of the Tabla fingertricks still in me, even though I had a 7 year break (Many Tabla students lose out on their wrist and finger dexterity after quitting Tabla for a few years). From my perspective cubing and Tabla do have lot of similarities, even though cubing is just 40 year old activity whereas Indian percussions have been developed and fine tuned for the last 2000 years. I cannot wait to explore more parallels between the two and hopefully scientifically prove their correlation some day.
Tingman interviewed a few of them, and produced an amazing video trying to dive deep into the topic and understand this aspect better.
Here is my story, I got to Indian classical music and a Rubik's brand 3x3, both at the same time, in the summer of 2008, when I was in my 7th grade. In the Indian classical music I chose the instrument of Tabla, which is a melodic and highly complex and rhythmic percussion instrument played in world music. I learnt the Benares style of Tabla playing, and lots of phrases and composition and time cycles in it which has been passed on for 300 years uninterrupted. Since my learning of music was guided via a teacher, and my learning of cubing was mostly self taught (from badmephisto and cubeloop.com websites), I progressed a bit more in music, as I was able to learn proper technique for Tabla playing from my guru, and I went nowhere with my video taught but self-improved 1TPS LBL solves on a trash Rubik's brand cube.
I had to drop off both the activities a few years later as I had to prepare for the world's toughest entrance exam, IIT-JEE, which is taken by millions each year for only 4000ish spot in India's premier undergraduate institute (super brutal preparation, makes millions of Indians soulless and depressed every year) . Once I started with my undergrad in Chennai, India, I planned on resuming both my activities. The Dayan Zhanchi cube was trending then in 2013, but there were not that many sellers in India, so I had to get one at a very overpriced cost, finally graduating to my first speedcube after spending 5 years with a terrible Rubik's brand. I was able to cube a lot in my undergrad and attend over 35 WCA competitions, but on the other hand, I was unable to resume my playing music, as my college was located in South India, where Carnatic classical music is well known, and the percussion instrument played in Carnatic music, mridangam, is much different from the Tabla. TLDR Tabla is non-existent in south India and hard(rather impossible) to pursue, also video calling and skype was not great back then (low internet bandwidths and bad compression algorithms) , so I could not connect with any North Indian classical artist to get coached online.
Personally, I feel cubing and Indian music are having lot of common aspects (I cannot say for sure for western music though as I am not an expert on it), the phrases and the rhythmic patterns that I improvise and learn in the Tabla, help me chuck my algorithms in cubing better, and learn them faster and more efficiently. As both the drums of the Tabla are a 2D surface whereas a twisty puzzle is a 3D object (as pointed out by pianist Jake in the video's interview), most of fine tuned motor skills that I learn in Tabla do not directly translate over to Cubing. But one thing that I can say for sure is that, when I was on a 4 year hiatus from the Tabla instrument, and only speedcubing in my undergrad, all the cubing practice helped preserve the looseness of the wrist that is required for Tabla playing. When I resumed learning Tabla again in 2018, my teacher was impressed that I had most of the Tabla fingertricks still in me, even though I had a 7 year break (Many Tabla students lose out on their wrist and finger dexterity after quitting Tabla for a few years). From my perspective cubing and Tabla do have lot of similarities, even though cubing is just 40 year old activity whereas Indian percussions have been developed and fine tuned for the last 2000 years. I cannot wait to explore more parallels between the two and hopefully scientifically prove their correlation some day.
Im also 14 1/2, so I started when I was three.
please don’t use it
