Critical listening and altered states

I appreciated very much your posts and experience...

I am retired and i did a set of intense experiments in acoustic 7 day /7 for 2 years... I tuned 100 Helmholtz resonators and learned about the importance of their  localization in the room and the way i must used them to modify the pressures zones of the room to my liking...

At the end the soundfield was like surrounding me and each tone was a volume in space, in an opera i could see the singer singing and walking in all my room near or far from me.

i adjusted mechanically my resonators of various size from a straw to 8 feet with big volume because like you i learned how to feel  the sound wave zone of pressure and the comb filtering induced by the geometry of my room and his size.

I l;earned how to localize the many devices i used, not only resonators, but a balance between diffusion/absorbtion/reflective panels (homemade) and devices.

it was a trip because each evening the music became more and more alive, and with a process of trials and errors i reach an optimal level...

i am pretty sure you understand me...

Thanks for your interesting testimony...

No doubt gross timbre inaccuracies would induce stress. I believe more marginal timbre inaccuracies aren’t a major concern for most. How often do most of us listen to non amplified or non sound reinforced music? I presume most of us generally hear live music where the instruments are both amplified and sound reinforcement is being used. In general I much prefer my home system sound to live concerts, sound quality superior and I can control my environment.

 

 In speaking to environment I’d posit our listening room settings have a great influence on our ability to enter into ASC. By this I don’t mean acoustic room products, rather the esthetics of the room, also time of day, I much more enjoy night time listening, my room completely blacked out, and I have various light shows I can enable to fit the mood. Complete quiet also best, the lower the ambient noise levels the better, 30db vs 50db is a very meaningful difference for hearing the lower level info and/or quiet passages, especially important for classical.

 

Speaking of acoustic control, I spent years analyzing how different room treatments affected the sound. As part of this I learned to visualize sound waves, from this I began to hear how sound waves excited the molecular structure of my listening space. Taking these visualization helped me to hear how my entire room (over 30’ L), mostly the space behind listening position affected the sound. As an aside, my first visualization of molecular space came from LSD trips out in nature, what in all likelihood was pollen in the air lit by moonlight was perceived as something far more meaningful. With LSD one loses all perception of time, I recall starting trips at perhaps 7pm, the sun could be rising and I’d be sitting in one place the whole time, its like one single thought consumed me that entire time, I never recall any perception of repetition.

 

I like the reference to boredom, no doubt ASC cannot be accompanied by boredom. Repetition can easily induce boredom, two reasons why I like the robot picking the music, one is its mostly completely random, surprise displaces boredom, two I don’t have the need to interrupt the ’flow’, with me having to choose the music I have to consciously make the choice, this takes away from the ’flow.’

THC. FTW

Certainly no musician has been high...Or maybe I was stoned when I listened to A Passage to Bangkok  Fun thread by the way thanks! 

@newton_john thanks for the book reference; my library has it and I’m going to take a look.

@stuartk I’m not talking about utilizing substances in precise doses, only trying small amounts to see if one’s perceptions alter and give them a new insight into how their system sounds. It’s not more complicated than that, but too many here have taken ASC and assumed that I mean becoming sh*t-faced. That’s not it at all. It’s about stirring things up a little bit and taking another look.

@sns "Our only reference for timbre is acoustic instruments played without sound reinforcement." Not sure I agree. I’ve heard Stratocasters played through amps, live; wouldn’t that be a timbre that could serve as a reinforcement? Indeed, any electrified instrument that is recorded via a mic would then be a reference for the later-amplified sound coming out of a stereo. But, perhaps, the change in timbre is just not as critical – perhaps that’s the point, namely that there would not be "gross timbre inaccuracies" which would induce stress. 

Regarding LSD and the visualization of space, this is an interesting example insofar as it indicates another possibility for my suggestion. Not so much that one alters perception while they’re listening to audio, but that they take note of how acoustic space sounds at another time while under an ASC. Then, as you did, they can consider that angle of view later on, when they are listening to music. We gain new perspectives with ASC’s and if they can be somehow incorporated into our way of understanding things, they become resources to break out of routine judgments.

One of the most impactful and deep effect of  THC in concentrated form on me the few times i tried it listening music, was not so much  on my acoustic perception , which seems increased, but on the visual perception of the musical content meaning not as merely purely musical and auditory but as fractals and as a movie given to be seen...

 Even without THC i "see" music way more than i am able to "hear" it, because i am not a musician anyway and not musically educated as a player like stuartk, i interpreted naturally music as a visual  abstract story... think about fractals and metamorphosis of forms..

In some case , Bruckner 5 th symphony for example, i see a continuous story about man death and the afterlife...the vast geometry of the last mvt tell the story taking one by one all the thema of the first three movement recapitulating them, the first time i heard it i was strucked by a revelation, the final very long fugue is almost vision..