Picture imperfect

Last week’s New Yorker had a fascinating story on the quest for 3D sound. The idea is to fool the mind into perceiving music spatially to achieve an all-encompassing sound in which the listener can determine the location of individual instruments as if hearing the music from the center for the performance. (Unfortunately, the full article is available to subscribers only.)
But what really struck me was an almost throwaway remark about “the vital role of the not-too-perfect in our pleasures.”

The two expressive dimensions whose force in music Levitin had measured and made mechanical were defections from precision. Vibrato is a way of not quite landing directly on the note; rubato is not quite keeping perfectly to the beat. Expressiveness is error. … [W]hat really moves us in music is the vital sign of the human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace. … Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection.

This idea reminds me of the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi, finding beauty in the imperfect, unfinished and transient. Wabi-sabi is the polar opposite of the Western idea of beauty in the ideal. But it seems to match human experience -– we find beauty in nature, an asymmetrical, wild, ever-changing and never-finished reality.

For me, the same thing comes into play in science fiction and fantasy. The most interesting characters aren’t the oh-so-perfect Superman, but gritty, conflicted, morally ambiguous characters like Batman and Ironman. And forget the smooth-as-plastic futurism of countless sci-fi stories. I’ll take the dystopic, sand-in-the-astromech imperfection of Star Wars, Blade Runner and Robocop any day.

Most of all, I’m reminded to enjoy life as it is -- not how I wish it to be. Ultimately, we have only so much influence on the external. But internally, we can choose how we respond to it.