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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Accuracy vs. Musicality (and YMMV)
Post Subject: More about cable elevators..Posted by Romy the Cat on: 1/17/2026
 Paul S wrote:
Great answer, Romy, at least for me. I still like Camus the more for excluding Stalin (the person), even at the expense of Sartre, and of course I do not conflate Communism with... whatever. I like the way you are working with language here, like a young Peirce. Dialog may still be possible, to judge by that post.

Paul S
Mike, it’s interesting that you mentioned dialogue. Yesterday I had a conversation with my audio friend about how my thinking on audio has evolved over the last four years. I brought him up to date on where I am now and asked whether it makes sense to speak about this publicly. His reaction was that almost no one would be able to understand it. He is right about the difficulty of comprehension, and wrong about the significance of that difficulty.


I’m seriously considering recording a video and laying the whole thing out, not as advocacy, but as clarification. I’m no longer surprised by where I ended up; in retrospect, the trajectory is coherent and almost unavoidable. What has lost all mystery for me is how trivial, and often absurd, most of our so-called audio frustrations appear once you step back and examine the objectives that drive them. In audio, and in music more broadly, many of those objectives are poorly examined substitutes for meaning, transcendence, or control, and the frustration they generate is largely self-produced.

From a certain perspective, the consumption of musical or audio experience unfolds in a vacuum, detached from its own sonic, aesthetic, and ultimately even ethical context. At this point the act of composing and listening cease to be primarily sensational and become informational, a form of communication operating at the level of consciousness itself. When techniques emerge that allow communication directly at that level, much of what we produce as music—those shamanic, quasi-ritual gestures of shaking air with instruments or machines—begins to lose its centrality.

This is a delicate threshold. Music can serve as an initiator of a conscious stream, a structured sequence that catalyzes awareness, perhaps even guiding possibility into experience. But the conscious stream does not belong to music. There is a subtle and essential decoupling between musical intention—the attempt to evoke consciousness—and the consciousness that arises in response. Music may open the door, but what passes through it is no longer musical in nature.

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