Yes. Such an edit works perfectly.
As long as we remember to leave traces (pointing out the edit in this case).
I cannot begin to explain the plethora of aha! moments that occur owing to the way you explain things.

Since you're staying up late (that'll teach you!) the following.

Chic. Good Times. Not that I don't know this song, but I missed Disco entirely at the time (scary drums asking all sorts of response I was not willing to give). So I had to go back to it at a later date. And tried a bit of everything - setting all personal preference aside. So overrated. Not. (I'll skip the bit where I married a drummer just to proove I wasn't scared and to learn the very hard way that personal preference may have its place!)

It's the too overt repetition that gives me no joy, so I had to find a way into all music (which would not be possible without repetition!) by the random guidewires you pick out here. Is that following the melody? The modulations? The instrumentation? I wish I knew what I was doing, because I have this feeling once I knew the steps, I could just dance them. (Not thinking of the wonky hips in this metaphor.)

I HEAR the piano and the rhythm guitar. They are almost sufficient to distract from the drone (I have a good relationship with bass guitar, which also saves the day here.) But we can do better. Also in Disco. I just can't think of examples: I never can.

I often don't know why I like (?) a song and will listen (study?) it in depth. It has its advantages that I don't "know my music" because then it makes for very random factors in my work.

A song/piece of music will often "fall into my ear". Example, yes, have one! Joyce Sims, "Come into my life". Some time in February I was just about to go to sleep when this song "came to me". Out of mid air, hovering in the dead of silence. I didn't know it existed (consciously) but thanks to having been handed a fragment of lyric (fortunately also the title) Google came up with a Joyce Sims for me. Yup, that's what I had heard. I was over the moon. Listening to it again, today, I only hear something relatively annoying about her voice (not out of tune but... struggling?).

All this tossed into the stir fryingpan together, it seems I don't listen to music like good folks do. I close my ears to whatever is not interesting (often lyrics) and start to filter for ... and I never know quite what. And filtering musically is very tricky for me. Who is playing what. I have learned it is definitely a matter of practice and getting to know what you work with. It is also handy, I guess, for once in your life to have a teacher instead of always being one.

It could, in this fairly insipid case of Sims, just be the few opening bars of this song before the beat kicks in, that was all I needed. I cannot identify what it is that I am "hearing". But I remain adamant there is a "decoding" possible, which is something that fundamentally happens for all good, ordinary people who get "stimulated" by music (i.e. enjoy it). I believe I have skipped that small simple pleasure of life available quite naturally, because of the autistic family I grew up in. Yes, there are parallells happening to all our young people with the general hearing fatigue and the trash that is called music. But my "deformation" is more comparable to a wolf-child and it showed up in all its rawness in 1988/9 when I started training my ear (two weeks at the Alhambra, going to live classical concerts every night, that ate into most most of my savings at the time. But it grooved something indellible into my soul. Fija te, debajo de las estrellas, al pied de las Alpujarras: that, the whole, was the real music, whatever they were playing -.... It turns out something in me was listening closely. It made me a firm advocate for guarding against "bad" music (art, education, entertainment in general). If you get exposed to that more than in passing you not only waste your time but hurt mankind. If you are exposed to good music (good things, products, produce, clean air, la vie du un bon sauvage, the art of technology) it will work and find it's way to feed you. To contribute to a better Man.

What do I know about music: such are my sources!

This Granada music can never die, eventhough I haven't/ couldn't possibly consicously record it. As I grow older -nearer the end? - it is starting to be played back to me.... and this is how the All-time keeps bleeding lately and keeping me up too late. Leaving this inserted in parentheses for what it is. But I won't have it said that it's not not there. What once was inside is now right before me, to be plucked out of the aire, wherever I go.) Mabye, it's just called, freeing up.

I find myself, especially in the car, (on days when multi-tasking is still possible) going over and over a piece to discover exactly the moment (the line, the harmony? the shift?) that triggers my "joy".

The car really doesn't DO flac, even if you wanted it to. But what an idiotic thing to say, me cutting house-wifey corners (pragmatic) with a metonymy: it's the SD card-car stereo readability that is not compatible. An MP3 player doesn't have that problem, but now I'm wondering if it has any flac on it (can it read flac as an MP3 player?). Have I now only got MP3 on my NAS drive (god, yes also one of those to keep track of)...? No, just ripped (I retract that of course or add, from a CD I own... allright, I can't lie....borrow and pay for...and use only for my very own ears) Bach cello concertos in flac, because I had a whimsical notion I'd lose something in Mp3. Whether I'd hear it on my Silverline speakers, I don't now. Not likely.

But to complicate things, oh why not now we are on the subject of music, as I grow deafer (can life be crueller. Yes, the eyes are going, too) I notice we don't only hear with our ears. Ok. Write me off. But before you do, hear me out. What is the"quality" that reaches you, in a Chinese prison, where you've been living on stale bread twice a week, next to a dripping tap, for the past six months and a line of Bach's cello suite should float in on that one beam of light a day that falls through the bars of your (ever open) window high up near the ceiling (which isn't very high)? Does hearing "better" sound matter? We value it so highly, today, in the music business. I followed a classical music programme for a number of years, going for zero to a fair bit of knowledge by that route. But the discussions they can have about which recording sounds or what is wrong with the engineering sometimes goes too far, into the pretentiousness of having something to say (it's your livelihood, I know guys, yes mainly guys, but we listeners don't really care, and are you really the appointed ones for quality control?) What is better sound, what you say regards this make perfect sense to me. I intuit the same, and we are basically saying thereby there is a value to finding the right production. We mock, but lovingly mock, the scratchy records of granddad. Or hear the scratchiness as a groovy sound effect, with nostalgic connotations. Digital meets one demand, analogue another, they live together, for now, till something else comes along to surprise the caveman. It will all play into but only be marginal to something more fundamental about music. You may not know it, but I think, just maybe you can hear that.

Now all this blabbering is not listening to music! It is just more work. Only enjoyable for a workaholic.

To end on a funky disco note, I am reminded of
Shakatak, Down on the Street, the very first record somebody gave me to add to my one other record by Sachdev. Had a little listen, hadn't heard it in ? 30 years? It is still easy on my ears, for if I need to slip out of work into something more comfortable, reset the brain, before we begin again.

If we keep this up, I'll discover I have a whole musical story to tell!
And I am fascinated to discover why most of it will fall flat on your ears. Now that we've agreed there is no accounting for taste just a different specialisation calling for different "sound" and different "play" to match. The diver and the knitter have much to share. We might not even have a radically different type of hearing. Things just get lost in translation. I think there might be delectible musical engineering metaphor in here somewhere.