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In the Forum: Musical Discussions
In the Thread: It looks like a simple question

Post Subject: Look deeper.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 2/1/2026

Robin, I genuinely appreciate how you describe the circumstances of your life outside the listening room and how you connect them to your listening experiences, forming a kind of personal mosaic. I hold a strong theory, that a listening event, whether at home or at a live performance, is not derived solely from what is heard. It is a complex multidimensional phenomenon in which sound itself is only one ingredient among many.

What was exceptionally beautiful in your reply is something you most likely overlooked yourself. You wrote, “Many times something in D-major will sound way too dark or too bright for my expectations.” That single sentence is the key to everything.

There is no argument about whether your perception of darkness or brightness is accurate. We do not need to debate it at all. The fact that you experience this feeling is already data. From there, you begin to examine the circumstances of the recording or performance and try to build a causal pattern between what you believe is important, such as microphone placement or the church space, and your subjective impressions. This is perfectly reasonable if your objective in listening is simply to have those subjective feelings, full stop.
However, if your objective is not the feelings themselves but the consequences of those feelings at the level of consciousness, then the entire orientation changes. You no longer ask why you had a feeling or failed to have one. Instead, you ask a different question: what is it within this feeling that caused me to reflect on something.

This is a completely different level of inquiry, and the difference is enormous. At this level, whether you had a feeling or did not have one, how intense it was, or whether it came from beautiful trumpet phrasing or refined driver tube articulation becomes irrelevant. What matters is not the sensation itself but what in you responded in a particular way to a particular sensation.The mere fact that a sensation occurred is no longer a noble objective. What becomes truly interesting is the mechanism by which sensation turns into consciousness, far more than the mechanism by which sensation is produced in the first place.

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