When we hear music, what is it that we hear? What is it that contributes to what we hear? We know there has to be a musician. We know that wood made, for example, the guitar we are listening to, or that wood made a turntable's plinth, or a tonearm's armtube that holds a wooden cartridge body that allowed a mechanical interaction to be transduced into an electrical one. Without that wood there is no music. But it may have been metal that was used for the instrument, and hifi. Or plastics. Without them there is no music.
There are no monopolies in materials, nor in music reproduction. There is no one way - there are many. But within each way there is an interlinking, a unity which is unbreakable. We are not concerned with components, but their interaction; not with entities, but systems. And to try and remove one component destroys the whole. This is why comparing two different components within the same system only tells us which component works best in that system.
Similarly, we experience music, not just hear it. We take in stimuli from all our senses concurrently. We are not able to dissociate and exclude. It is part of the human condition. If there are no stimuli, or we are deprived of them, we generate our own in the form of imagination or hallucination. We also are systems, and to try and work at odds with this fact is bound to be worthless in the long term.
When we hear music, what is it that we hear? A pleasant melody? Musical notes? Bass and drums? Soundwaves in motion? Air being compressed and rarified? Patterns of Nitrogen and Oxygen atoms in space?
The silences or spaces in music are often considered to be just as important as the notes themselves. However, considering the relative sizes of nucleii and electrons and their distance from one another, the spaces within the notes take on a much more intriguing role: for the notes themselves are 99.9% space.
