Concentration

@devinplombier  

“classical is perhaps the only music genre that periodically faces calls to be either removed from the curricula of public universities or to have public subsidy of its study and performance curtailed or ended”

I don’t know where you get your information, but as someone who is in the business I can tell you that it’s far from the truth.

Well yeah those who have a playlist that contains Cardi B’s WAP have a general disconnect. But not all is lost. 
 

I still don’t know why you made that statement originally and what your source for information was and I’m not questioning it. I learned to just use these types of posts for their sole purpose - entertainment 

The idea of the prismatic mode of listening so apt, I listen in all modes @hilde45 mentioned. 

What has become most salient to me over decades of building systems and optimizing and improving them is a growing preference for more complex music played with acoustic instruments. As one's system improves much easier to follow complex and densely recorded lines, you get to finally hear much of the low level info that you may have missed in the past. And acoustic instruments have a 'natural' timbre  which allows one comparison to a 'live' instrument. And so it seems the quality or qualities of our systems may impact our choices of music we choose to listen to. I continue to listen to many other genres and more simplistic, less complex music in which sound doesn't play as big a role, perhaps nostalgia, other emotions come into play. And all this can be seamless for me, with streaming I can play exclusively within a genre or randomly play from all genres, this all a single cut from an album. With random play I can go from lets say a classical cut to a honky tonk cut, listening modes may change quite drastically from cut to cut. I just let it be and let the music take me in whatever direction the robot chooses, amazing experience to let someone or something take over the CHORE of choosing which music to listen to. I'm just along for the ride!

Am I the only one that does this? The title of this thread mentions concentration, for me the above mode of listening requires the LEAST concentration. Back in the bad old days I remember having to look through multi thousand cd, vinyl collections, later on streaming library in order to find exactly what I thought I might want to listen to. I might spend 15 minutes deciding on some album, cd to play, that was not seamless listening for me, far too much concentration.

Yes, I agree. Another gratifying  form of listening is letting the music just drift over you.  It’s a different form of enjoyment from intense listening.

@rvpiano  I think this "concentration" is a good part of the reason why many say that vinyl sounds better than digital. I'm included in that lot, but my analog system is much superior and should sound better. But vinyl, by its very nature, causes us to pay more attention since music must be dealt with every 20 minutes. IOW it makes us pay attention much closer than digital. Just a thought.