[mathstuf]

I have tried many times and I have been very unable to make any progress. In The Witness game, I ended up just guessing at the hardest whistle puzzles because remembering high/low order is very difficult at real-time speeds (mostly I can only compare "higher/lower than previous" so something like 2-1-3 is very indistinguishable from 2-1-2). Absolute positioning is even worse. The "end game" tanker puzzle is still unsolved because I don't want to cheat at that one but I have never been able to get the audio part down. I believe this is because my short-term memory "ingests" via audio (100% aphantasia, so no visuals to help out), so trying to "store" more notes erases anything longer than a note or two back (or I remember those notes and miss new notes coming in). Contrast this with Simon-like games (original, Brain Warp, Bop-It, etc.) where I was routinely able to get 12+ because I could "trace" a pattern in the lights/motions and "offload" the audio bits quickly enough to follow along and "compress" the sequence.

In this app, I ended up hunting for the first note and by the time I found it, I couldn't remember "how far" up/down the next note was (and by even 3 notes I often lost the direction from 2 to go). I /could/ figure out the key positions and go from the staff, but that goes through the FACE/EGBDF path of what notes the lines on the staff mean and is 100% non-aural for me. It's also extremely slow.

I also have a horrible time finding melodies and rhythms in music (kind of like Steve Martin in The Jerk, just more…physically coordinated at least). I end up "tapping" out every note and lyric syllable instead of being able to tease anything apart (separate instruments help, but then I lose "the rest"). Rarely was I able to effectively utilize those "song tapper" apps in the 00's to find anything I wanted.

I do remember playing the recorder in class in elementary school and at least "Horse With No Name" on a guitar in…some higher grade (7th? 8th?), but I believe those were very physical-oriented finger memory rather than anything to do with my ear helping out. New songs were basically from-scratch practices rather than being able to build on prior experience.

So while my ear might not be "tin", so to speak, my mind is not well-wired for ir.