The Listener: The most important component. Part II

[continued from part I …]

I think there may be other Mental Processors that we have to use if we want to get more out of our music and life. Higher-level processors. This is where we all have to make a choice, the choice of whether to take the red pill or the blue pill.

The blue pill will allow you to maintain believing in the dominant illusion. That an audiophile just needs a perfect system; perfect speakers, amplification, cabling and source gear and room; the perfect source media, perfect recording gear and mircophone and an excellent recording engineer; and you will have a completely accurate reproduction of the studio or live event.

This laudable goal is the bettering of having any band or musician play right in front of you with push button convenience. Better than live with no audience issues to distract one from their enjoying the music.

But perfection is in reality impossible to achieve and the closer you get to it, the more expensive it will be. And, when you get down to basics, this approach is all a kind of scientific curiosity of a sideshow if your goal is to enjoy your time listening to music, enrich your life and increase your well being. And, perhaps, just maybe, to experience some of the deeper meaning of life. If this, then, is your goal, then perhaps it should be pursued in a more direct manner.

And so we have the red pill. Herein we examine the process where one tries to experience the ecstasy of music directly; not through how well the reproduction succeeds and how well it measures, but how well it achieves its goal of making us enjoy the music and hopefully, sometimes, experience the Beauty of It All.

Our Pattern Detection Processor

This processor finds patterns [patterns are just relationships between one thing, like a note or a steadily increasing volume for example, and another thing or things, like other notes or the chirp of a whippoorwill or Spring, for example], often wonderfully complex and intricate patterns, fractal patterns, chaotic patterns, patterns of patterns, the lack of patterns, and the interplay between patterns, often simple and elegant patterns, in Music, in the dynamics, harmonics, transitions, timings, melodies, and more.

Some people are most sensitive to, say, geographic/location patterns and they are all about the depth of the soundstage, or its width, or about the size of the imaging. Others are more sensitive to timing issues, and prefer good rhythm. Others, like me, are most sensitive to spacetime, and like good separation in time and space between the notes.

But pattern detection [and pattern matching to some extent] is one of the things our brain does very well. Mostly renowned for its capabilities in the visual processors of the brain, it seems to work just as well on sonic input as it does on visual input.

Our Pattern Matching Processor

This Mental Processor of ours finds relationships between various patterns. How a simple patterns might mimic the broad nature of various intricate patterns. How the swell and decay of a note on a piano is similar to the blossoming of a rose. How a loooong note played by Roy Buchanan on his guitar resembles the sudden overpowering emotion that occurs when your significant other smiles at you [as, say, played on “the messiah will come again”].

The number of possible relations is a very large number and is effectively without limit.

Our Emotional Contexualizer

We actually frame all our experiences in these emotional contexts. Think of it like nostalgia. Can you play “Born to be Wild” without flashing back to the emotions you have while hearing it the several thousand times you have heard it before? When you hear emotion in a voice, to understand that emotion you have to empathize with it, or even to have experienced it yourself.

There is a lot more to be said about this. For a long time I have been wondering whether this may be the supercomputer part of our brain, which can see and process information more holistically and in very large chunks. But moving on…

Our Beauty / Wonder / Spiritual Processor

This Processor sees beauty and wonder in the way patterns match and offset and highlight other patterns that we see in reality and in our mental models of the universes we live in.

Not sure how the Spiritual comes into this except that it is, when you go down this path, easy to be overwhelmed with all the beauty and the wonder of it all… and your brain just sort of short circuits and kind of gives up and goes…

Whoa.

[I know. Some of you are thinking “Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?”. But the rest of you are hopefully thinking… “hey. That red pill ain’t so bad”. In fact, it is not only a lot more real, it is not only a lot more mentally healthy and spiritually rewarding, it is also just plain more fun].

The red pill is more real in that it gets right to the core of the reason we are listening to music in the first place.

[use the ears, luke]

As audiophiles it is right and just that we pay homage to accuracy. But only to a certain extent. Only to the extent that gear in its pursuit of accuracy, like doctors, ‘does no harm’. That the system does as little harm to the signal as possible, given our very real technological and budgetary limitations, but, AS IMPORTANT, is to do as little harm to the listening experience as possible and to the, yes, the most awesome component ever: the Listener.

This was just a strawman model of how we process music. The model is only as good as the extent to which we can use it to optimize the listening experience. It may or may not correspond to anything in real reality. But neither does most people’s conception of electricity as a flow of electrons. But that doesn’t mean that those people can’t design electrical components and it doesn’t mean we can design mental ones.

Next: now that the listener is recognized as the most important component in the system, how do we optimize it in order to increase enjoyment and the number of awesome experiences.