by Serguey Shinder
Someone set up a phone on a table while a few of us were playing, and afterwards he sent me the file without much comment. I had enjoyed that session enormously. I remember it as loose and warm, one of those evenings where everything sits in the right place and you stop thinking about what your hands are doing. Then I put on headphones and listened to what had actually happened in that room, and it took about eight bars before I wanted to stop.
I was rushing. Not badly, not everywhere, but consistently, pulling ahead at the start of every phrase like someone slightly impatient to arrive. I was also louder than I thought, sitting on top of things that should have been carrying the moment. None of this was audible to me while I played. Inside it, I had felt perfectly placed. From outside it, I was the reason a few passages that should have breathed instead felt hurried.
What I could not get past was the size of the gap. This was not a matter of taste or of being harsh on myself. Two accounts of the same six minutes, mine from the inside and the recording from the outside, disagreed on plain facts about tempo and volume. One of them was a memory shaped by how good it felt to be playing, and the other was a microphone that had no feelings about the evening at all.
I have thought about that gap in every other part of my life since. When I am inside a piece of work, I have access to my intentions, and intentions are the most persuasive evidence there is and almost the least reliable. I know what I meant the sentence to say, so I read it as saying that. I know what the design was supposed to prevent, so I see it preventing that. The inside view is not a view of the thing. It is a view of the plan for the thing.
So I have learned to manufacture the outside as often as I can stand it. Recording myself playing, reading my own writing aloud after leaving it alone for a day, watching someone else use something I built without helping them. All of these are unpleasant in exactly the same specific way, which is that they replace a flattering account with an accurate one, and the accurate one is never as good.
The recording did not make me play worse. It made the rushing visible, and once it was visible it started to correct itself, slowly, over months. That is the whole mechanism. You cannot fix something you cannot perceive, and the things you most need to fix are precisely the ones your own position makes it impossible to hear.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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