An interesting demonstration

@nonoise @mahgister -- Agree on the immediacy of the whole. I avoided the word "gestalt" because that word implies the way a thing has been “placed” or “put together." I think we're all agreeing that this larger whole *starts out* as fundamentally simple.

I also see the OP's question as a live one, though. How do we take in that whole (whether a complex-simple or a simple-simple) consistently over time? Hard question.

@mijostyn 

Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices.

Kudos on your description of this difficulty. It captures something very real about the challenge of evaluating audio.

My initial approach to such events is to initially take them as single experience, which later turns out (on inspection) to have multiple parts. Scenic views come across this way, as well. Looking at a landscape, I don't go jumping around from one particular to another, but "take in the whole." Indeed, most of our experience of eating is exactly about the combination of flavors and not the individual flavors.

I guess my point would be that the experience of the combination can be as immediate as the experience of the particular; indeed, the experience of a particular which is embedded in a larger whole involves the mental act where we have to "prescind" or "abstract out" something which only then gets our selective attention. But in the initial moment, we experience (what we'll later call) the complex. But we experience it as a simple.

This point -- about the complex whole -- doesn't really defuse the difficulty you pose, because there again, we can *take* that whole complex in various ways, each time. (Is the landscape cheery? Is it plaintive? Is it intimidating? Etc.) So, how could we ever compare? -- that would be the challenging question.

I'd start the answer with the word "habit." I cannot hear a choir in a million different ways for the same reason I cannot see a staircase in a million different ways. I have habits of listening, habits of staircase maneuvering; habits of tasting. These habits become my bases of comparison; they allow me to compare one listening session to the next, and because I'm a self-in-society (and not a random self), I can gain insight from what you hear and perhaps hear it that way, myself. 

@nonoise Yep -- that's exactly the sleight of hand that this panel is embarked upon. Fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Whitehead called it.

I can't do it at once. I move through the various modes.
Thanks, Mahgister. Interesting ideas, there.
I think the hifi podcast guys, Darren and Duncan, also remarked on how you can tell a room/gear setup sounds good from out in the hallway. That's an interesting indicator of how sensitive we are.

I certainly listen to the landscape with complicated pieces like a symphony unless a particular instrument sticks out that I am interested in.The problem is I do not listen that way when I am evaluating sound. Listening to music and evaluating sound are two distinctly different endeavors

When I was learning to listen critically last year, someone (Darko?) suggested listening not only with focused attention, but to do a crossword puzzle (e.g.) while listening. Almost a "peripheral vision" kind of move.

This would help one shift to a mode of listening which, while attentive, was not acting like a microscope. (So many visual metaphors! So few aural ones!)

To stick with the visual analogies for a moment, when I go to a museum, I start off by standing about 6 feet from a painting; then, I go in close to look at various details, then I back up.Landscape or single element -- they're all attended to critically in this process (for me).