This opens with a disclaimer … it’s not my intention to mock anyone in this post … that point is genuine … but in order to make the various points, I need to draw attention to some shortcomings … heaven knows there are enough of my own to render me oh so very umble.

One of my contentions, at 0228 Thursday morning, is that cranked up sensitivity to perfection of form (the artistic aim of eye and ear) will then note the slightest discrepancy, the slightest flatness or defect … and reject it outright, almost as an outrage.

An example is my own grasp of language, such that the slightest error immediately stands out like a sore thumb … or in some of the reader critiques below on perfection of form, the English errors in their writing, to my eyes, are excruciating.

I’d ordinarily have not even noticed, the focus being on other things. But as they’re banging on about perfection in music, their imperfection in English also stands out. It will for you too, simply as I’ve now drawn attention to it.

One thing though which half a life in education has taught me is that it is way out of order to show irritability towards a learner if he or she is attempting to perfect form and is obviously falling short. To my mind, that’s a crime against learning.

This sensitivity to form though is behind my not finding Baroque music worthy of DAD … or Sunday jazz not worthy of Dearieme or AKH … and therefore I abandon attempts to, despite the kind disclaimer from the worthy DAD in comments right now. The thrill for the teacher is seeing the aspiration to excel in the learner, the thirst, even though the attempt falls short, over and over. Any good parent understands this.

It started, this train of thought, with Wings of Pegasus banging on about a jazz singer being autotuned, the culprit being YT:

What’s the Disney bit above? It’s a corner of the advert which rudely intruded on the video right in the presenter’s mid-word, not even waiting for a logical natural break. Philistine in the extreme. YT at its most crass.

Yet what can we expect? They’re a tech organisation, they’re not aesthetes, and the very ability to tune into my current focus and supply whatever videos it could find has stood this blog in good stead before … it certainly supplied me with the screenshots below. Kudos to that tech, kudos to machine learning … just for us to be here reading thus is a triumph of today’s tech.

Taste? Well (cough) … er … maybe not YT’s forte. Yet it can bring us videos such as this:

… followed by videos such as this:

That type of “jazz” is just not my thang, any more than big band orchestral swing in the 40s … and yet, if you follow his reasoning, backed by pitch graphics, you can see how grating this is upon him, upon viewers too, especially as in the previous vid of the olden day singer:

And on Chet Baker, the subject of WofP’s horror of YT’s treatment?

Did you notice the English error in the screenshots above … or in my spelling of “this” as “thus”? What you might not have noticed is that in order for this post to format properly, I had to edit the code behind, removing the html of “screenshot” for example. There’s no such thing as just typing and be done any more today.

And so to this daughter:

We had that video once before, going into her mom’s “wrong side of the tracks” start to life and horrendous childhood … her daughter here is doing a “none of that matters to me, mom” eulogy, uncomfortable to a mother who’s seen the rough side of life … and yet here’s her daughter running videos on “the war on b’yoo’dee” … talking aesthetics.

Time for yet another attempt by me at three hours more sleep before a restart aroubd 0730. See you then, hopefully.