> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have."
But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.
"The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."
This is exactly correct
The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other people, have gotten into the habit of appending site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality declines. This gives better results from actual humans (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits. This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the information about them is true.
"product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need"
I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.
Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.
I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers.
Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder?
Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.
I learned on HN years ago:
Buy a cheap tool. If it breaks, buy one for twice the price. If you lose it before it breaks, buy one for half the price.
That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.
Cheap tools are usually adequate to judge whether this is a type of tool you need and will frequently use... and cheap tools may be adequate to meet your entire need.
I frequently buy cheap tools while I am learning about whether I need a "real" one and which one I should then select. I would suggest other people do so, too.
Yeah. The trick is to never buy a cheap replacement tool.
I actually got a cheap Chinese chainsaw for some light work around the countryside, it cost me about 80 EUR and performs adequately for the task at hand.
So then I bought another one of the same variety, with the expectation that once this (or the other one) dies, it can be cannibalized for spare parts if need be AND I won’t have to stop in the middle of doing something, cause of the backup.
It’s much the same for me when buying mechanical keyboards, computer mice, HDDs/SSDs or other technology too. My current CPU is on AM4 because I have the old one as a backup and a spare motherboard too.
What can I say, I like having backups and being reasonably frugal: e.g. getting a mid range phone since I don’t need fancy features and if anything happens to it it won’t be a big financial hit to replace (or use any old one for a bit, until the new one arrives, since none receive software updates for that many years).
I agree with you. I do think there are different levels of cheap though.
I don’t have the eloquence to quite describe, but it’s the difference between a harbor freight miter saw, a Milwaukee, a Makita,(their 12 in. Dual-Bevel Sliding Compound Miter Saw, is amazing, but I still use my harbor freight dual bevel as well with a different blade for more construction ish stuff vs trim work / precision ish), and a festool.
My father drives me insane with this. He buys these $1 can openers that break every 3-9 months. He thinks I’m insane for paying $10-$20 for a can opener that has now lasted me 9+ years.
I probably would have been okay with a $5-7 one.
More succinctly : the cheap One is cheap for a reason. But that doesn’t mean you need the most expensive. Usually the cheap tools end up being more in the long run. (Breakage, poor quality output, time, material usage….)
When I first got a 10 inch table saw, I couldn’t believe how easy things were: setting the fence, cutting hard wood, depth adjustments were so much faster. But I still have my 8 inch craftsman I paid $5 for at a yard sale 20 years ago, and it’s not bad.
I'm not advocating for running out and filling your shop with boutique tools by any stretch. Mid-market brands like Dewalt are perfectly serviceable without incurring all of the safety issues that harbor freight brands are notorious for.
As a DIY person with a garage filled with every type of tool imaginable, that is some of the best advice that can be given: buy cheap tools, but expensiver tools if it breaks.
IME, most people don't use the cheap tool enough to break it.
As a contractor who makes a living off his tools daily your read-through is one of the reasons why I know so many people with permanent eye injuries from buying shitty hammers. Cheap tools are dangerous.
> Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.
Right, and that reason is because there is a market for testing tool waters to see if it is a tool that you even need. Often you cannot truly appreciate if a tool is a tool you should have before trying it. You can read testimonials from other people all day, every day, but until it is actually in your hand...
So, hypothetically, do you buy the $100 version with clear compromise, but good enough to offer some validation, or go for the $1,000 ultimate version from the hop? That's the gamble. If your assumption was right, you're in deep for $1,100, but if your assumption proves wrong, you're only out $100. That's the idea here. When in doubt, try the cheap tool, and when you're still wanting to use it beyond its constraints, you've proven you need the more premium product. If you leave it sitting on the shelf, now you know you don't need the tool at all.
As with all short-soundbite suggestions, it's not meant to apply to all situations. But in the average case, it is likely that you are better off gambling the hypothetical $100 – especially when the undertone is within a hobby context. It is very likely you will discover you didn't really like the hobby anyway. Of course, as always, it is assumed you will still bring your thinking cap to the table. Indeed, there are situations where going straight to the hypothetical $1,000 tool is the right choice, but the saying is merely pointing out that it isn't always the best choice like some people are inclined to believe.
Part of the problem is that expensive tools are not usually expensive for a reason. Till you work with the cheaper one a bit you don't even know what you want from the expensive tool and can easily buy a "cheap" tool at a high dollar cost.
Another side of that idea is that you often don't need the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly, and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were heavier, or had more attachments, those would just represent a waste of space in my house.
The recommendations aren't bad, they're just overkill. Makita makes great tools, but depending on the tool, cheaper ones are fine for most purposes (cheaper, not cheapest, I've seen too many Ryobi contraptions start smoking for that). Guitars and bicycles are two more I've run into where reddit advice will have you paying much more than you need to. Sometimes it's okay to get the no-brand Amazon version, and sometimes it's very much not. It's a skill to determine which is which.
I do think you're right that average quality has gone down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their products function till the last day of the warranty and not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent business philosophy.
Not really. You can use powered bookshelf speakers or studio monitors just fine. That's what I do.
Small amps have gotten remarkably good in the last few years.
Top google result for [tv soundbar reddit] https://www.reddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/137ukxi/are_soun...
is this exact debate.
That's in r/Soundbars, which is naturally rather favorable. The outright dismissals I've run into come from the much larger r/hometheater, which is also the source of most TV audio buying guides.
it absolutely doesn’t, the common reddit recommendation is to just get edifier r1280dbs and a sub, and you’ll outperform most soundbar systems that cost even 2x as much.
The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have gone actively backward over time.
I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--generally at 7:30AM.
So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have listened to every soundbar available at retail.
They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were better than that 10 year old JBL.
Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we replaced. And she is correct.
It also leads to bots posting ads disguised as posts to reddit. Often they are posting in communities that nobody subscribes to but google indexes.
But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up). But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all that is done.
Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
The compromise in question is called equal temperament, and it's quite interesting if anyone is curious.
In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor constant ratios across all of the strings).
and wind instruments can and do bend their notes with their mouths to fit better in the chord than equal temperament
"Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different".
For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning.
In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period.
Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
I don't know, I guess everything ends eventually, but people still play the crumhorn, the carnyx, and the eunuch flute.
Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is.
It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."
It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters.
Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.
Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20 years later.
To follow this analogy, isn't it possible then for someone to study precisely what the difference is, and become an expert, thus bringing us back into the level of expertise we were at at the start of the analogy?
Surely the experts didn't all learn from each other; who was the first expert? That expert surely learned in some other way, so the only thing lost at the start of the analogy is the time required for someone interested to (re)achieve mastery.
There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and finding lots of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking.
On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week.
On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.
Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.
Even if you can tell the difference between the way two objects sound, there is a leap between that and deciding that one is worse than the other.
I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time. Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern. But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables, they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :( How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
"You might not have noticed it, but your brain did" - H. Plinkett
It also appears to ignore the fact that pianos had to be invented. The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out. Or, not beholden to the past, future generations might determine/discover a new “best”.
A similar story is often told about really old violins.
I thought that was debunked, that in "blind" tests experts nearly always selected modern, high end violins over the Stradivarius's (Stradivarii?).
That won't stop people from telling the story. Wine is the same way.
I disagree. In a blind test I can absolutely tell which application is running natively on Windows.
Wine, the beverage.
I think you missed the joke.
But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same.
Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication.
Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based.
The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers who make theirs sound different, and of course each violin from the same maker will have their own sound.
That is really the point. The fact of who made the violin is much easier to conceptualize and communicate than any of it’s acoustic properties.
Yes, and that's common knowledge among most musicians nowadays. Sure, it's hard to be a musician -- amateur or professional -- and not also be an enthusiast. And I don't think very many violinists would turn down a chance to try a Strad, or at least hold it and look at it.
There's still an open question about whether the new fiddles are better, or that the old ones are deteriorating, or both.
Disclosure: Working double bassist. And don't get me started about bows. ;-)
French bows or German bows? Just so we know what not to get you started on.
That is sort of what I meant. The idea that ancient violins hold an unattainable mystique. That is now just an investment vehicle.
I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my answer.
If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation.
But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone.
To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."
Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.
Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were.
Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas.
Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce just the same -- but there is no point.
He's got a point.
Not really, he isn’t accounting for variation in skill level in his anecdote. If this piano tuner is just average for his profession, which seems likely, then the piano is still out of tune to the top 20% of discerning musicians, aficionados and expert piano tuners. The problem is there’s only a very small amount of that skill to go around so the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. The bigger problem is with the author’s assertion that a robotic piano tuner must necessarily be worse than a human. Maybe the currently available electronic tuners are but that they remain so isn’t a given, it’s more likely that they could be better but it would simply cost too much to achieve that level of performance at the moment. With sufficiently cheap electronics and intelligence it may eventually be possible to sell an automatic piano tuner to every piano owner that far exceeds any human’s ability. Is that not a valid way to achieve perfection?
Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there are two concerts on the same day they might or might not tune between them.
Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert - even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the stage before the concert which is the most likely way to mess up tuning.
They said the piano will be imperfectly tuned even when it was tuned just now, if the job was done by an average-skilled tuner.
I just think these are the thoughts of old people.
The creative mediums of the day are tiktok videos and video games.
It is the same line of thought from back in the day that the electric guitar is just noise, people should play a "real" instrument like the clarinet!
Rap is just noise, they aren't even singing! People should play a "real" instrument like the electric guitar.
Tiktok is not art! I am talking "real" art like Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol's movie Sleep. No one is making REAL art like that anymore I tell ya.
These two sentiments aren't that uncommon amongst gen z either, in my experience.
What do you think about mediocrity?
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/mediocratopia/
I’m fascinated by mediocrity as an aspiration, understood as optimization resistance and withheld reserves. Mediocrity is slouching towards survival. Mediocrity is pragmatic resistance to totalizing thought. Mediocrity is fat in the system. Mediocrity is playful, foxy improvisation.
I think your point is going to be lost on people who view art as a commodity to be consumed. From that point of view, replacing the artist with a machine can only result in a loss, if the person consuming the art could tell the difference in the first place. If not, then who cares if a machine or a person tuned the piano, etc?
There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human attention to go around.
There could be, but most individuals don't have the agency to freely allocate attention.
In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
That's not as much attention as to cover everything we can direct our attention at. This is so obvious to me that it almost seems like a tautology.
More so, there being enough attention to go around is tangential to whether the sum of our attention colors in all the space.
I’m not 100% sure but I read that part as a little bit of a joke? Like in the context of the story, the author had just describe the fact that the piano sounded only a little better, they thought, during the concert. Possibly the difference was imperceptible to most of the crowd.
So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally being over-dramatic.
Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move, because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it is bad enough to matter.
I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite people do, they probably play better if they know everything, even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is going right.
It truly is a poor craftsman who blames the tool.
That is a reflection on the types of tool a good craftsman uses.
While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good results, they almost always use good tools (not using good tools is often done to prove a point).
Sure. But, when self-criticizing, the good craftsman understands that their tools are their responsibility, the customer cares about the results.
Maybe I don't want parallel minor 7th intervals on the piano to exhibit gradually changing beats among the harmonics, in proportion to the frequency. Maybe pianos don't need to be same to that extent.
Pianos should not have that - a piano should have a minor 7th that doesn't beat at all. However if you play the key tuned as a perfect minor 7th and use it as the root note for a standard major chord (root-third-fifth) it will sound terrible as the intervals will not even be close. Your choice is have hundreds of keys on the piano so that when you want the chord you select the exact perfect pitch you want (called just intonation), or we have to compromise the tuning of the piano somehow so we can get by with just 88 keys. We have chosen to stick with 88 keys and then use equal-temperment as a compromise so that the key we use for a minor 7th also sounds okay when used as the root note in a regular major chord. The piano overall sounds much worse than perfect, but it is an acceptable compromise. there are other compromises that people sometimes argue are better, whole books have been written on the subject.
I don't think that's what the article is talking about: differences between perfect minor 7ths and equal-temperament ones. Rather, the tuner in question basically has already nailed the equal-temperament minor sevenths already (as far as you or I might think) and is just listening for beats among their harmonics now, so that when a run of parallel minor sevenths is played, the frequency of the beats among the harmonics rises in proportion to the frequency of the chord, like speeding up a recording.
Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of one) and make that assertion.
Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning.
For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
What if when climate change isn't a big deal you have the equivalent of a person using a free app with ads to tune your piano reporting to you, and when climate change is a big deal you have that piano repairman that can hit a key and tell you the string is rusted when struck too hard from experience.
I think it's simpler than that - it's just repetition and practice. Even if we lose a skill, we can learn it again. And IMO very quickly - if the author of the article practiced tuning pianos for a few hundred hours, he would quickly discover how is his skill increasing.
Also is it worth it. We know longer know how to make a saturn-V rocket like what took us to the moon. We could figure it out, but we have much better technology and so if you want a rocket like that it is better to start from scratch at this point. (it probably would be cheaper as well once you adjust for inflation, but for sure better. Faster depends on your budget, NASA paid a lot of speed in the saturn-V program)
I think this is the rub with anything subjective ie culture, especially art. Case in point greek sculptures from antiquity. We have known now for a while that they were painted and even know what pigments were used and can go on to create some semblance of what they probably looked like. But I have yet to come across anyone that prefers them to the unpainted versions. [1]
More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics. Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3Rhd...
[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM
If all mathematians die we may get stuck with ℚ.
That doesn't mean that irrationals don't exist or aren't worth exploring.
Love the last paragraph. Well described.
And even on things that impact us, we can't be experts.
The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack looking at that.
There's anyway, at the moment, more people that are more discerning. Maybe not for tuning your cheap upright piano, but it's pretty likely there's more concert halls with more amazing grand pianos than there ever was before.
You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine art between the late classical period and the early medieval period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills for centuries.
We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages.
I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.
It is not so clear-cut though. There is a hierarchy here that the article misses a bit I think. There will be participants of various awareness level:
1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all 2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously, affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be typography which operates mostly in this realm) 3. Members of the audience that consciously notice that something is off, somewhere 4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is off 5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong with the piano
We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin' yet.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypian...
I don't feel that statement is stating that if X happens we're screwed; its stating that if X happens why is life worth living?
Its only one metric among many, but rates of depression and anxiety diagnosis are at an all time high.