Cymbal sounds are hard to sample because of their rich enharmonics. Electronic music often has rather "poor" sounding cymbal sounds. Now acoustic drummers want to replicate electronic beats on real drums, emulate this "poor" sound, so cymbal companies put out acoustic cymbals designed to sound fake - electronic - like Zildjian's "re-mix" line.

For a poet to have a good "ear"? This implies, in the first instance, a capacity to hear poetry (rather than a productive capacity). Then to be able to hear what one is writing. I might have a good ear but not be able to produce anything that demonstrates this to the world.

The most prominent percussion soloist in the world today, the Scottish woman Evelyn Glennie, is profoundly deaf. She also has perfect pitch - or did before she lost her hearing in her youth. She plays barefoot better to "hear" the music through her body. I don't really understand how this works!

The way we hear language is influenced by the meaning of the words, even the part of speech.

Suppose I could imitate Clark Coolidge's style. Phonetically, a taste for dense sounds; onomatopeia. Morphologically: he like the suffix "-age" in words like roughage or overage, etc... Syntactic breaks, nouns used as adjectives, concentrations of monosyllabic accented words. I believe I could (conceivably) write in this style, and be completely original, since the emphasis, the quality of the insistence, would end up being different even if I reproduced all of these features. What is the difference between an imitation that is intolerable and one that is seen as a productive breakthrough? I sometimes think Koethe is way too close to Ashbery, even though I can read it with pleasure if I ignore this fact. The same with some of the Gamoneda clones in Spain.