Old habits, such as using tropes, die hard

By kenver · Oct 16, 2015 ·
  1. I have a lot of bad habits. One of my bad habits is using flowery, indirect language. Here’s an example that especially makes me feel like shit:

    It kind of shows that what we conceive as"rhythm" is not one dimensional--as in points representing triggers on a line representing time--but extends into the dimensions of tone, volume, timbre, etc.

    This makes me think “yuck.” All of the highlighted words are redundant or unnecessary in some other way, and the green words straight-up give me disquiet. Here’s a better version of the sentence:

    It shows that rhythms are more than points on timelines.​

    To my ear, this is as good as this sentence can be without becoming a different sentence. But it stinks nonetheless. It seems vague and dishonest. Here’s an honest revision of the idea:

    [The music of the Ikue Mori Pandora station] is characterized by unusual changes in timbre and pitch. It achieves this in part because it uses weird sounds. In a loose analogical sense, there are rhythm-like patterns in the changes in timbre and pitch in this music. What I mean is if you plotted the changes in these values somehow, the graph would somehow be isomorphic to the graph of a somehow-plotted rhythm. This makes me wonder if all music is fundamentally rhythm-based. If I’m being honest, the sentence before this one is, almost word for word, something I said to a coworker one time and thought sounded cool and somewhat feasible. A few minutes after I said it, I thought about it for approximately thirty seconds. I’ve thought about it maybe six times, thirty-seconds each time, since. Now that I think of it, it’s a poor idea.
    Which seems almost right, but I noticed that I didn’t express something properly:

    This makes me wonder if all [parts of] music is are fundamentally rhythm-based rhythmic.​

    But I hate the consonance of “music” and “rhythmic” so I’ll quit writing forever.

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