If humans had 4 arms, we'd probably have some pretty wild musical instruments

Alivrah@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 298 points –
42

If I had 4 arms id eat a sammich and drink some chocolate milk while i fap.

Take the upvote. For some reason you taking over his ideia this way made me laugh uncontrollably.

Have you seen an organ? It’s basically several keyboards stacked on top of each other, including a single-octave one for your feet.

Now imagine that, but stack a set of drums on top. Maybe even add 2 additional legs while we're at it!

Like, I dunno, an organ!

The main character of the The Hydrogen Sonata by Ian Banks features an alien that had modified themselves with an extra set of arms so that she could play a crazy double necked cello.

Looked for this comment and was not disappointed. The Antagonistic Undecagonstring ❤️ (I just finished the book a second time)

Like the Antagonistic Undecagonstring?

I clicked hoping to see a Hydrogen Sonata reference and was not disappointed.

Meanwhile, I can’t find the brainpower to play an instrument and form words at the same time. I pretty much end up drooling on myself.

If humans had 4 arms we'd need 8 pants pockets! We're going to need bigger butts along with the arms to accommodate all of those pockets.

If be willing bet that if we did have four arms, women still wouldn't have dress pockets.

the skin flute would be even more popular!

Yeah, with electronic help, like a looping device or just recording different tracks one after another, you can obviously do amazing things, but you end up lacking a lot of flexibility to quickly improvise or adjust yourself to what's happening in the other voices.

Having said that, in an orchestra, you don't really want most of the instruments to go wild, so simple instruments would still be a thing. Even today, there's lots of instruments where one hand just holds the instrument.
I guess, with 4 arms, you could attempt to play two violins at the same time, though.

To take it further, if humans had 4 arms, our heads would be a different shape, because we'd need more brain to control them. AFAIK that would mean a bigger back of head (cerebellum) and a bigger forehead (frontal lobe).

Imagine a one-man band, except he's two bands.

IMO: currently the best one man band is Shakey Graves... check his video.

https://youtu.be/sD72LbIk02M

I think Shakey Graves is good, but I think Steel Beans encompasses one-man band even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=louAX5OPPtI

His original stuff is cool too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJJ-aYsGl4