She played the nocturne she'd been working on for six weeks. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"All the pedal clicks?" he said.
She looked at him. "What pedal clicks?"
"Every time you lift the sustain pedal. There's a click." He shrugged. "I counted seventeen in the first minute."
She put her hands in her lap. She'd never heard them. The pedal was part of the sentence — you pressed it for sustain, released it for clarity. She didn't hear the mechanism any more than she heard her own breathing while she spoke.
"Is it bad?" she asked.
"It's not bad or good. It's just — that's what I hear."
He'd been a sound engineer for twenty-two years. He heard rooms, not music. The reflections off the wall behind her, the resonance of the lid angle, the precise moment the dampers lifted off the strings and the slight buzz of the one that didn't seat properly.
She played the passage again. This time she heard them. Tiny, percussive, like a fingernail tapping wood. Once she heard them she couldn't unhear them. Every pedal change was a small interruption.
She stopped playing.
"You ruined it," she said.
He shook his head. "It was always there."
She thought about that. The pedal clicks weren't information she lacked. They were information her attention had decided to discard. Everything she'd practiced, everything she'd refined over six weeks, had been built on top of a sound she'd edited out. Not suppressed, not ignored. Edited. As if her ears had a draft that her brain published.
She played the nocturne again, all the way through. The clicks were there. They would always be there now. But by the third page, she noticed something: her timing had changed. Knowing the clicks were audible, she'd started placing them. Not eliminating them — placing them. Between phrases, where the silence could absorb them. Where they became part of the breathing.
He heard it too. The clicks had become rests.
"Better," he said.