What follows will make more sense once you read these thoughts put forward by Paul McGowan (CEO and co-founder of PS Audio) in one of his daily PS Tracks communications. (You might care to subscribe.) Here Paul considers of the ongoing controversy between observationalists and measurers/scientists.  You may note parallels with some of the combative political rhetoric that is  widely reported in the general media.  To me, the audio-related discussions are more interesting.

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If someone wants to start arguing about measurements and observations (I remember when the fussing used to be about “objective” vs. “subjective,” I guess those terms are passé), I’d suggest a good dose of Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

Neurons and synapses are the actual “last components” of our audio systems.  Lots of very interesting scientific observations and measurements are taking place at that level, many leading to conclusions that may be important to audiophiles.  One of those is that in music listening, timbre trumps pretty much everything.

The book has its weak points.  The author’s discussion of jazz-making practice and terminology is a bit off and the book just sort of stops rather than coming to a satisfying ending, but those are minor quibbles.

The fact of the matter (which I have been touting for years) is that the goal of music reproduction in our homes is not careful re-creation of movements of molecules in our listening rooms but the re-creation of states in our brains that parallel those of listening to actual, rather than reproduced, music.

Levitin reports, by the way, the brain states and brain waves occurring when we “play back” music mentally through recall are essentially identical to those observed when people are actively listening.  (Of course the experimental design would have used reproduced music for the active listening component.)