Something went wrong. Try again later

nintendoeats

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Adrian.Justice&hl=en-GB

6234 828 66 158
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

This Is A Song

It would mean something to me if you cranked up the volume and listened to the songs that I've posted below. I'm not feeling great right now, and it would make for some kind of therapy-like thing. Maybe.

I'm not sure about perfection. If asked, most people would say that perfection is inherently good. Perfect is all the good right? I don't think that's really true though. Imagine a perfect circle for example. It's perfect in the sense that it is the archetype for a circle, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. In fact, it's a pretty limited thing. OK, I grant that you can have perfect circles of varying radii, but beyond that perfect circles are constrained and are only useful in a small handful of circumstances...and even then, an imperfect circle will almost always do the job just as well. Perfect circles also don't contribute any information: If you were to actually make a perfect physical circle it wouldn't tell us anything than the simple mathematics that defining it don't. My point is that perfection is constrained and rarely useful. I'm going to play a song for you now. I think that I'm going somewhere with this.

OK, so was that perfect? No, of course not, that's a ridiculous question. Music cannot be perfect. It's subjective right?

I don't think so.

Perfection is shockingly easy to define in music: chip-tunes played in normal time signatures without any dissonance are perfect. Assuming that the chips in question were made properly and the speakers are sufficiently faithful, music of this sort is technically perfect. Well OK, that is a very mathematical approach to the universe, but any reasonable definition of perfection should be in some way mathematical, or at least have a proof condition in a defined logical system.

I don't think that chiptunes are the only example though. There are songs in which every note has been carefully placed to be perfect. Sometimes this is done by musicians, a practice which I am given to understand ruined A Guns and Roses album. Other times it is done by a pitch corrector or other computer. While that can be done artistically, often it is just a process to make things more perfect.

So, going back to the song, it's not perfect. It certainly contains dissonance and the melody (if you could call it that) doesn't stay consistently on or anywhere near the beat. Subjectively, it isn't even to everyone's taste. BUT...I wouldn't change a single thing about it. I don't have any external emotional attachment to the song, it resonates with me in and of itself. As far as I am concerned, if you were to change anything about it the most you could hope for is not making it worse. The last thing that I want is for somebody to make it "more perfect". That would be terrible. Here is another song.

I lied. It's the same song. A rare (aside from being on the internet) version of the same song as it happens. It is also not perfect. The notes don't float in and out in a regular way, and the other bits layered on top are pretty sporadic and seem to be improvised. I don't think that this version is worse than the original. I think it's also as good as a song can be.

So both of these are as good as a song can be. They are both similar, but also clearly distinct. And yeah, it is possible for other songs to also be as good as a song can be. Completely different songs. Dear Prudence, there is one. Moonlight Sonata for another. And my point, through all of this is that none of those things are perfect. If they didn't have their flaws, they wouldn't be nearly so interesting.

And that makes me kind of sad.

Those skimming, you may wish to read the last paragraph at least

For a long time human societies had reference points. We would point at things and say "That is perfect. All things are judged by this. If you want to make your thing better, follow this more closely." Ironically, Plato is the archetypal example. Confused about something? Go see what Plato said about it (or possibly J.S. Mill). As I've just demonstrated, that is really a ridiculous thing to do...but it is also very freeing. When you have gold standards and "correct" ways of doing things, then you can also have certainty. We don't have that anymore. If you are working on something, how do you tell if it is as good as it can be? How do you tell if YOU are as good as you can be? You can't. Instead you must simply polish until you can no longer stand, then again until you can no longer kneel, and then desperately call for someone to judge your projects in the hopes that you only imagined those blemishes which seemingly escaped your reach.

TLDR: Without perfection we lack archetypes. Without archetypes we lack certainty. Without certainty we lack rest. Else we accept that we must fail and achieve nothing.

25 Comments