Listening without interpretation...is it impossible?
I came across an interesting quotation about texts which applies, it seems, to music listening and audio:
"We never really confront audio immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, audio comes before us as the always-already-heard; we apprehend it through sedimented layers of previous interpretations or --if the audio is brand new -- through the sedimented listening habits and categories developed by those interpretive traditions." [Paraphrased from Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981)]
If this application to audio is accurate, it indicates that what we hear and how we listen are profoundly influenced by how we talk about it, argue about it, interpret it. The ways we talk about it and who we talk about it with change the very ways we “confront” or encounter it the next time.
This would apply not only to the macro impressions about entire songs or even passages of songs, but even the minute ways we describe the details. (Using “etched” to describe the “highs” or “boomy” to describe the “lows,” and so on.) It also would set aside, as obtuse, the repeated suggestion that one can ignore what people say and “just get back to listening for oneself.” There is no such way of listening. Yes, one can move away from the computer, for days or weeks or more, but the notion that one can move one’s “own” mind away from the “sedimented layer of previous interpretations” is, well impossible.
I’m not sure, personally, where I fall on this interesting question. Just wanted to share it.
Not sure that I agree with the notion that the way others describe what they hear influences MY perception of what I hear. Of course, if there is to be any kind of meaningful dialogue one has to try and interpret what someone else is trying to say. This is why I have always felt it would be extremely helpful on a forum such as this to somehow develop, limitations and all, a more consistent and meaningful “audiophile vocabulary”. As things stand, descriptive terms used are all over the place and often inappropriate and thus meaningless.
A few favorite (?) examples:
“Accurate”. Often intended to describe a sound that is lean and/or dry with emphasis on upper mids and highs. However, the word “accuracy”, by definition, suggests that for something to be accurate it can only be so compared to something else; and that something else is not necessarily something that is “lean and/or dry with emphasis on upper mids and highs”.
“Colored” - huh? Colored compared to what? The sounds of music are extremely colorful.
”Cold” - Somewhat like “accurate”, often meant to describe a sound that is top heavy and perhaps lean. I remember bringing a new amplifier home to try and my wife referred to the sound it caused my system to have as “cold”. Yet, the sound was not lean, nor too bright. What she meant, and I agreed, was that the sound was rhythmically dead; little sense of rhythmic aliveness, hence emotionally “cold”.
”Warm” - the opposite of the above in every sense.
I'm sure the quote is true, the question really for many of us is whether we are sharing the same context as others. With art it is the same thing. Each artist and genre comes to us as a response to what has come before.
Some lucky enough to get a background in music or art culture are in on the message the new works are trying to say. Some are just experiencing the works completely out of context. I have a great example of this for myself.
For me David Bowie was just another musician. Kind of an old folksy British rock guy. I lacked the musical context of what was before him and what made him so extraordinary to so many.
But of course, it's all subjective and that's what makes our hobby of chasing the "holy grail" sound (for our personal gratification) so interesting.
It's taken me 40 years to construct and tune a hi-fi system to my perception of a palpable sound reproduction. Soon, I shall have a loss of hearing. What could I have done with all that time and money? Solace unnecessary.
@frogman Since none of us have a private language all our own, the very words we use to describe what we hear (to ourselves) are part of what others say. Your comment about the importance of developing a meaningful audiophile vocabulary speaks directly to that, and I completely agree. I also agree that descriptive terms which are too vague or too chaotically deployed do more harm than good.
@erik Yes, the context is so important, insofar as all words root back to contexts for their invention, development, and nuance.
@bobpyle It is all subjective in the sense that it is all rooted in subject's experience, but since what we experience emerges from interactions with others, embedded in particular cultural and historical forces, I'd prefer to say, "It's all inter-subjective." And since that's all we have access to, I'd be as happy to say, "It's all objective, though it varies as much as physical things such as snowflakes."
So what's the basic point that Jameson is making here? That when you encounter your first Shakespearean sonnet, you come to it with your mind and sensibility preconditioned by years of exposure to lullabies, nursery rhymes, and perhaps a dash of Robert Frost. Hardly earth-shattering.
Mutatis mutandis, if you've been a denizen of the Audiogon forum for a few years, you come to the listening experience influenced, at least to some degree, by what you've read here. Perhaps you can have an initial, momentary, purely visceral response to a piece of music (or even how it's being reproduced), but the moment the intellect kicks in, the pre-conditioning will too. Very few adults can achieve tabula rasa, and only under exceptional circumstances.
It is hardly earth shattering but the number of posts I see where people say just listen as if there was some way of getting back to an original pure experience that is not polluted by what people say may strike some as the antithesis of what they think they are doing. Sorry to underwhelm.
Are non-audiophiles non-audiophiles simply because they don't speak our language, or is something inherent to them? Could teaching them our audio language bring out the audiophile in them? Is there in fact a hidden audiophile within every human, or are we inherently a different tribe?
@middlemass Contemplate your navel? Are you up to it?
@sns"Are non-audiophiles non-audiophiles simply because they don't speak our language, or is something inherent to them?"
I think it has to do with vocabulary but also where they place their attention. I've heard that many musicians don't care about audio sound because they're more concerned with other things.
True. Many don’t. However, most musicians do care about audio sound; just not on the same level as most audiophiles. Even so, and I’ve made this point in the past, as a percentage of the population of musicians, far far more of them are audiophiles (mid level and up), or at least care about sound to some degree than the percentage of the general population of music lovers who are audiophiles.
I would say learned experience influences all perception so in that sense yes correct. I am not sure about others interpretations having influence however.
The vocabulary and sound experiences used and suggested by audio engineering mass market in audio magazines is NOT the vocabulary and experience used and suggested by acoustic and by psycho-acoustic sciences...
And the vocabulary and experience of music is NOT the vocabulary and experience of the others two...
Learning how to use and experience and DISTINGUISH the reality suggested by these words and concepts in these THREE different perspectives is very important...
But contrary to the vocabulary in acoustic and psycho-acoustic experiences the vocabulary used and suggested by electronical design mass marketing HIDE the musical experience behind the sound experience and for the sake of the sound experience of the particular piece of gear...
Acoustic reveal music, the focus on the gear obsession hide it...
For the OP. citation i think it is an interesting one because NO ONE can listen music tabula rasa... We all come from experiences and past history which act like a sieve and a filter... Positively and also negatively....there is a balance which is related to each one personal musical evolution history and cultural and spiritual knowledge here...
For example it is impossible for someone NEVER exposed to the history of the symphony in European music to catch the meaning of the 5th Bruckner symphony finale...
But when i was 14 years old i immediately loved Bach at first listening but with the help of a short musical education in a music course.... None other composers ever attracted really my attention at these times .... Then there is also a past history in us not coming from this life only perhaps and there is in us an innate taste unbeknown to us waiting to be awaken...
But music is like mathematics and the scale of each meaning levels cannot be PERCEIVED and LOVED and UNDERSTOOD without a loose or a minimal formal education of ourselves by ourselves or by others and with time and listening experiences...
Even crocodile are not tabula rasa anyway but we cannot change easily their basic taste....But it is possible with a baby crocodile with a part of him relatively a tabula rasa.... I have seen a South-american man educating a crocodile young to be his pet.... Perhaps he can teach him "love" manifested at his most basic level....Anyway....
«We can educate even crocodile with time»-Anonymus Smith reading Darwin and the Bible...
«Do you suggest here that we can educate audiophiles or the rap music lovers?»-Groucho Marx 🤓
«It will not be politically correct to say so brother»-Harpo Marx
Listening and interpreting is how one’s ears become trained. In fact all our senses work that way. The outcome should be better not worse. So I am not seeing a problem with how things just kinda naturally work. Am I oversimplifying things? Maybe there is a problem with how we naturally operate that I am not aware of? I’m kind of shy about complaining to the big guy though.
One thing which I definitely take away from the quotation is the idea that good discussions about audio have are integral to the changing meaning of the experiences of listening. Same thing has been true when I listen with a friend and we comment to one another --
"Notice that?" "That was kind of 'edgy'" "Really, I liked the 'sparkle' in that cymbal -- not edgy to me. Listen again." And so on.
Or when I read good writers reviewing speakers or other gear. They communicate a whole narrative of how they take the sound, how it moves them. And I listen again, with their words now part of my background. I don't necessarily am bent toward their words, but their words become part of what I anticipate, even sensorily.
If someone meditate and can forget when listening all his history and biases by definition, he did not listen to MUSIC anymore but to Sound frequencies or to silence...
This way of listening is very therapeutic, the more we put ourself into it...
But it is no more culturally and individually performed music which we listen to , it is communion with sound as an uncreated force...
In that silence and sound change their role, suddenly sound ressemble to silence and silence contain sound....
AUM is no more sound or silence but both...
Listening without interpretation is the definition of journalism...and also meditation.
Can you let go of your beliefs? or disbeliefs? and just listen?
That is up to the individual doing the listening, some can.... many can’t.
For sure between a necessary interpretative engagement in music listening, and a relax listening, and all the possible variations making us able to reach complete detachment and "no interpretation" at all of what we are listening to, exist many intermediary scales and attitudes and many hearing gestures......
But in general to begin with we must "interpret" if we want to choose what we want to listen to... And a baby learn to listen by exposure to some cultural musical attitudes to which he will relate to all his life...I remember how i listened to singing very young...
Only a yogi can listen beyond any relax attitude and interpretation, pure sound and pure silence, without even separating the 2....
For the "words" vocabulary conditioning problem:
The situation in audio, is most of the times a negative conditioning situation, because the "words" associated to sound most of the time HIDE the acoustic meaning and the musical meaning and experience.... It is more a consumer programmation or conditioning by the market pressure to sell tube and S.S. amplifiers for example, and to gather people around their specific attributed and alleged superior sonic qualities...Same goes for dac or speakers types...
But we cannot focus on acoustic and music by focusing on amplifier, dac and speakers difference only...
On the contrary, when the audio system is chosen, then we listen to the acoustical rendering of the music in a specific room....The audio system must disapear and with it all the vocabulary linked to it: warm, cold, neutral, accurate,colored...How is it possible? By acoustic and psycho-acoustic treatment and control specifically adapted for the chosen gear and making all musical sound natural and approximating a lived event...
The micro structure "volume" of a tonal timbre playing gesture by a musician in the larger "volume" of our room, is never understandable or graspable, in solely and merely with words like "warm", "cold" , "neutral" , "accurate" or "colored" qualities so much than by musically and acoustically meaningful vocabulary linked to acoustic experiments and musical experience first ...
We cannot interpret music experience with the engineering description of an amplifier sound first and last....
It is the reason why people comparing and reviewing gear never adress the basic method by which we can optimally embed the gear in their mechanical, electrical and acoustical working dimensions... They sell a ready made material product supposed to be PERFECT not a way and a method to install it the right way...
The sound of a piano in an acoustically controlled room, is not, warm, cold, accurate, neutral....His timbre qualities are way too much detailed and complex to be reduced to this vocabulary....Same thing is true about an orchestra and the acoustic description of his manifestation in a room...
Srajan Ebaen of 6moons fame certainly has an ability to relate his personal experience to audio system listening. He tries very hard to give context to his listening preference, by context I mean his emotional states.
His writing dense, bothers some, makes me understand we don't all speak the same language. I for one like his style, although I don't generally reach so deep.
""We never really confront audio immediately, in all its freshness as a thing"
We also never really see a tree, a person, a sandwich etc. It is the nature of being a person with a mind: our minds filter everything we see, hear, experience, etc. The only way out is meditation, and if only is lucky, enlightment. Other than those few beings on the planet, everyone else experiences everything through the filter of the mind which frequently includes judgement, comparison, etc.
We also never really see a tree, a person, a sandwich etc. It is the nature of being a person with a mind: our minds filter everything we see, hear, experience, etc.
This is where we part company. I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy and it has a fatal flaw -- namely, that there is some way we could step outside of ourselves to view, simultaneously, both the "reality" and the "perception" in order to determine if the representation is correct. Cannot be done.
Rather than mind as "representer" of reality, think Darwin; think, adaptive organ for getting along in a wider environment. Think of perceiving-thinking as nodes in an ongoing and transactional sequence. Perceiving is like breathing. In other words, our perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions involving eyes, ears, brains, and eventually language. There is no interface between "us" and the "world." We are the world interacting with the world.
"I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy"
Your words here (and Allah forfend philosophy) have zero to do with what I'm talking about.
To give you an example, the odds are 100% that at least one time in your life you met a man, woman or child and they reminded you of your mother, father, first girlfriend, cousin etc. At that moment you were not capable of accurately seeing that person who was in front of you because of your past. You were not seeing reality, because reality was being filtered.
It is unlikely that your mind will let you see this, but perhaps this will be of use to someone else reading this.
You were perfectly right to criticize the superficial notion of "representation"...
It is already in Schopenhauer reading Goethe and the Veda, thinking about the dead road of Kantism and Cartesianism...
But the representation theory so wrong when it want to explain perception, come from an history and from the evolution of consciousness with language...This must be explained but not here for sure...
Your Darwinian direct "participation" cannot explain perception either...
The truth is more complex....
There is no interface between us and the world you are right, but the "world" itself appear like an interface between "us" and us...Man is double, from evolution come history and these 2 are the 2 faces of man...History is cultures and civilizations, it is is a "symbolic form" related to the history of consciousness...
It is not the world which is divided in two...
It is us who are double: an animal body and his embryonnic ego and a spirit.....
The world is not double but it cannot be perceived in his "wholeness" without a yoga of the consciousness lived THROUGH our own body which is explained by Husserl but way better by the Goethean phenomenology...You can try Aurobindo if you are more interested in oriental attitude...
Perceiving anything in his true nature ask for a discipline of the mind and of the attention, alien to the common man prisonner of his habit and living in a "virtual" world...
There is no interface between us and the world , the interface is between our sleepwalking ego and our spirit and soul.... The interface is our own body between my ego and my soul....We must learn to inhabit our own body....We must learn to hear and see...
The history of philosophy is founded on the history of language and on the history of consciousness itself ...
The representation theory of perception is not even wrong, it is an half truth born from history.....
The Darwinian theory of evolution is not even wrong, it is an half truth born also from history....
The whole truth ask for the experience of oneness....This experience is the real basis to the participation in the cosmos and in the natural world at the animal level... In human this experience ask for a reappropriation of our animal nature instead of his negation and at the same time a spiritual transcendental experience of the "one"....All that in our own body/soul or External/Internal...
Like said Swedenborg very economically, Swedenborg stuttered al his life and learned to speak with very few words, speaking about death:
« In death the internal become the external and vice versa»
Then trhe relation between my body and the cosmos is a double in- flowing and out-flowing, like in respiration...It is a dynamic polarization which has been transformed in a static duality by habit and conditioning...
This is where we part company. I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy and it has a fatal flaw -- namely, that there is some way we could step outside of ourselves to view, simultaneously, both the "reality" and the "perception" in order to determine if the representation is correct. Cannot be done.
Rather than mind as "representer" of reality, think Darwin; think, adaptive organ for getting along in a wider environment. Think of perceiving-thinking as nodes in an ongoing and transactional sequence. Perceiving is like breathing. In other words, our perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions involving eyes, ears, brains, and eventually language. There is no interface between "us" and the "world." We are the world interacting with the world.
Gestalt psychology is only a fragment of the Goethean method who anticipate it completely...
I doubt reading your sarcastic posts about me for the last 7 years, without ever any arguments, i doubt that your amount of good will is enough to understand anything... Certainly you miss Geoffkait who you mocked in the same TROLLiNG way for all the years i was here with you childesque "tin foil hat" insult reflex....I must be your new scapegoat obsession...Old age create habit... And your sarcastic habit reflect the beginning of a health problem perhaps : how old are you?
Acting like a children or a troll make it difficult for me to guess it...
The only excuse i can give you is that this last post is only an inoffensive sarcasm, and my strong reaction come from the annoying habit you have to troll my posts...
I apologize but forget me and look for an another windmill...
Anyway if you want to understand the relation of part and whole in a living perceptive experience try this:
It is unlikely that your mind will let you see this
What is unlikely is that you have any idea what my mind will let me see. So let me invite you to speak just for yourself. But really, @berner99I apologize for an answer that was over your head.
Still, let 1000 flowers bloom.
Maybe my answer will help others and maybe yours will help some, too.
If your read and understand my post you will see that you are right about "representation" theory of perception but he is right too in his own way about the way the mind conditioned by language and historical personal and collective history filter our inattentive habit of perception...
Then you are right all together but from different perspective...
Understanding each other first is more important than to be right at the end , in most ordinary non critical situation of everyday life...😁😊
You must have a verified phone number and physical address in order to post in the Audiogon Forums. Please return to Audiogon.com and complete this step. If you have any questions please contact Support.
