Let beauty be imperfect

#39—On Judy Garland and tornadoes, again!

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.  

---

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

That old line from Casablanca doesn’t quite have the same ring to it in today’s hyper-online track-everything world. Things just have a habit of showing up. Like this week…

I’ve been singing Judy Garland’s Over The Rainbow to my youngest daughter lately to help her fall asleep. It’s the song of the moment, her moment to be precise, which means I must sing it again and again until her eyelids grow heavy and her head sinks into my shoulder. I played the real song for her the other day, admitting that she’ll never want to hear me sing it again after hearing Judy, and I’ve almost been right—she’s only let me sing it twice since. Oh the shame!

It had been decades since I’d actually heard Judy sing Over The Rainbow, or watched the film The Wizard of Oz, and what struck me while playing the song was just how beautifully raw Judy’s voice was. You just don’t hear people sing like that anymore (this thought unfurled silently inside my head). It’s like liquorice; complex and earthy, a note of tobacco but addictively sweet.

So, would you believe, of all the screens on all the computers in all the world, Judy turns up on mine just a few days later. She was in a YouTube video by Fil Henley from Wings Of Pegasus titled ‘THIS is why you’ll never hear a voice like Judy’s again.” Bonus points to Google for reading my mind. I click on it, half expecting to watch a few seconds, find my answer and be off. But Fil’s video was actually quite fascinating.

This young English musician was demonstrating how pitch correction software works in music and how music producers and singers are using the technology to their detriment. Now I’ve always thought pitch correction was used for pop stars whose vocal cords weren’t all they’re cracked up to be, but it turns out its use has become a standard practice in today’s mainstream music industry. So, at the request of his audience, Fil analysed a rendition of Over The Rainbow by American singer Kelly Clarkson. Kelly, being a strong singer with great pitch control, shouldn’t need pitch correction software to override her natural voice, but as Fil demonstrates, it’s used to do precisely that. Running the song through the program, he shows how her voice unnaturally syncs perfectly to notes—too perfectly, it’s actually impossible for a human to be that perfect—then he compares her singing to a tuned instrument and finally to Judy herself. And what we see in the instrument and Judy’s singing are sounds that fluctuate around the notes—they are raw, and they have depth and soul. They are the liquorice. What Fil points out is that a good singer singing naturally is actually more in tune with the instrument than a pitch corrected rendition. Their imperfections are beautiful.

It's left me wishing that songs came with a declaration of voice tampering, like influencers and affiliate links or athletes competing at an Enhanced Games. And it’s given me a greater understanding of why, with ears that have become accustomed to pitch corrected voices, I was so moved by Judy’s singing right before she was carried off by a tornado to the land of Oz.

Bluebird, water colour and pen sketch by Alia Parker.

Speaking of which, you may remember my story Winds of Change last week about tornadoes and microbursts in Australia (don’t you love it when two unrelated stories naturally sync like that—I swear, it’s not pitch corrected). Well, I have a rather exciting update. I had contacted the Bureau of Meteorology over a fortnight ago to check if the two incidents I mentioned—Martins Gap and Gapsted—were tornadoes, microbursts, or something else entirely and, while they said they would look into it, the days ticked by and I had started to think my request had gone with the wind. That wind was clearly cyclonic because yesterday, they got back to me and confirmed that they had analysed the sites via satellite and other available information and that the damage I witnessed at Gapsted was indeed caused by a downburst. However, the site I didn’t see at Martins Gap, but of which I shared the footage, turned out to be a tornado after all. They said:

“Radar evidence, observed impacts and video footage confirm the occurrence of a tornado in this area. Satellite evidence suggests a tornado path up to 25km long and ranging between 100 and 400m wide spanning Howes Creek, Marcs Cove to Boorolite/Howqua including Piries.”

Both weather events occurred in the same supercell thunderstorm on August 25.

The Bureau said about 30-80 tornadoes are reported in Australia each year, and that the real number is likely higher because there are sure to be some that occur in remote areas and go unreported. They said tornadoes mostly occur in north-east Victoria, south-east Queensland, central and eastern parts of New South Wales. That’s interesting because most Australians will never come close to encountering a tornado, and it’s a wide-held belief that we don’t get them here.

So the mystery has been solved.  

Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• Education Matters: The Authoritarians’ Playbook of Cultural Manipulation—by

  Alexander Verbeek 🌍

  Alexander shows how history can repeat itself if we don’t heed the signs.

• 'We float with the sticks on the stream...'—by

  Tash

  Being ill can give you a whole new perspective of the world.

• Eleven Preditions: Here’s What AI Does Next—by

  The Honest Broker

  “…here’s the bottom line: Reality is intrinsically superior to phoniness.” Sounds like something I just wrote, although Ted has something much more serious to say.

  

Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is:

genius

---

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back next week. Until then, keep 💪.