Blogtrek

Updates: Taoism, mondegreens, and true north

Taoism principle: Since yesterday, when I came up with all these versions of one of the principles of Taoism (The tao that can be mentioned is not the Real Tao), I came up with some more that are interesting. For example, after hearing a song by Stephanie Corby called "True North", I came up with this one:

The north that is observed is not True North.

Which of course has this corollary:

The north that is found on a magnetic compass is not True North.

So from an Ultimate Principle of a major religion, I have derived a mundane fact that any Boy Scout knows. So it appears that we stumble through life, limited by our senses, not knowing what Reality is, while we experience magnetic reality.

Mondegreens: I remarked earlier on how mondegreens occur in Amy Carol Webb's songs; for example, I heard "tears" as "tease". I tried something else today. I listened to Stephanie Corby's song "True North" (the song I mentioned above) and found it hard to keep focused on it. It did have some interesting lines, such as "Sense of direction". I figured it was a song about how one needs to keep focused on a goal to achieve it. But I just found it hard to listen to. Could it be that it contains mondegreens? I tried this experiment. I listened to "True North" without looking at the lyrics of the song, and tried to transcribe to paper what I heard. Then I compared it to her intended lyrics that came with the CD. I found no less than 17 mondegreens! I also found an 18th one that I resolved: I heard "graves of" and on a second listening heard "great". I heard "inner" as "Hannah". This is another case where a singer tries to avoid the hard-to-listen-to "eerrrrr" and winds up creating a mondegreen, causing me to hear "inner" as "Hannah". Sometimes you must sing "errrr". Other mondegreens I heard were "there are parades" for "I always", "soame" for "zone" (her "n" was apparently not distinct), and "eh?" for "my".

I feel the main causes of these mondegreens were that her melody was not clear and easily heard above a too-loud accompaniment, and that she drawled her words so long that the endings of them tended to get lost, or the syllables became two or more syllables, and that to improve the song, I would make the singer louder and the accompaniment softer.

In addition, I feel the singer in this song shows dependency on her "true north". It is an oft-used theme that sells, but in this case I would have preferred a searching theme, where the singer realizes, as I have said before that the north she is seeking is good but is not the true North. As I said above, the north that can be sung is not the True North.