My ear and the machine are acting up. The ear, weary after partial hearing loss years ago; the potentiometers, weary after years of use. The mood swings of the machine are becoming hard to predict. It behaves as it's supposed to, and then, as the show goes on, suddenly out of tune and full of Contingency. The cold digital impartiality of the tuner tells me everything is surgically correct. But I hear the bass is off, and I can't explain it. Same with the way melodies and counterpoints behave. Another time, it's a slight microtonal distance between voices that wouldn't go away. And yet another time, everything is as it's supposed to be. As if it is the will of the machine to perform one way and not another, and there is nothing I can do but submit. The machine and I are moving into the liminal, ambiguous, obscure. The machine, as its ways become unpredictable, and I, as my sense becomes unreliable. I wonder, however, whether what I'm considering as Contingent is, in reality, an eloquent testimony to a thinly veiled Providence.
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