What my iPod taught me

Ye Gods I hate the sound of children's voices raised in song. It's like chewing on tinsel...with your ears.

The effect of singing children is sometimes mediated by the fact that they can be gathered in great numbers and therefore no voice is independently niggling, and the overall effect is only slightly nauseating rather than blindly infuriating. I don't hear nascent life and hope, rather I hear the flat, nasal sounds of abject ignorance -- ignorance that is so deep and wide that it takes decades of smashing to breach.

Perhaps it really is a matter of whether you feel children are innocent or ignorant. Though, I assume innocence is annoying in it's own way, like the unending babble of nonsense. Innocence, at least on some level, knows that it doesn't know. It doesn't debate, it doesn't announce, it doesn't declare. Ignorance, on the other hand, doesn't know that it doesn't know - it's ugly and confident and oh so dangerous. This is what I hear in children's voices, and it's a horrible, terrible sound, indeed.