An interesting demonstration

The fact that "music" is not sound perception ONLY, illustrate the misconception about what acoustic is precisely in his scope....

We cannot hear what we are unable to name first...Save a noise without physionomy....

But for example a good acoustician can SEE the sound in a room... Like some blinds navigate street without help by echolocation... Acoustic laws are not equation on a sheet of paper only or electronic computer equalization impersonal  program, but they MAY be perceived phenomena in a room...My mechanical equalizer is precisely that...

And what we are able to name we may hear it in a chaotic crowd of instruments...

And we must learn how to perceive to name something...

A cigar is a cigar for someone who know that he must smoke it, otherwise it is an herb packet...

And nonoise say something meaningful here mijostyn , dont throw a personal argument against him.... This wrong way to argue has a name in a debate....

He said that picking the trump of an elephant  when keeping blinders  could mask the overall geometry of the object...

I certainly listen to the landscape with complicated pieces like a symphony unless a particular instrument sticks out that I am interested in.The problem is I do not listen that way when I am evaluating sound. Listening to music and evaluating sound are two distinctly different endeavors

When I was learning to listen critically last year, someone (Darko?) suggested listening not only with focused attention, but to do a crossword puzzle (e.g.) while listening. Almost a "peripheral vision" kind of move.

This would help one shift to a mode of listening which, while attentive, was not acting like a microscope. (So many visual metaphors! So few aural ones!)

To stick with the visual analogies for a moment, when I go to a museum, I start off by standing about 6 feet from a painting; then, I go in close to look at various details, then I back up.Landscape or single element -- they're all attended to critically in this process (for me).

There are just as many if not more factors that make up a great audio performance, timbre, location, size, dimensionality, detail, dynamics, focus. Both your system and the source have to provide all of that and you have to pay attention to all of it. As a mental exercise can you do it all at once? I certainly can not. 

nonoise, you are making it far more complicated than it actually is. Why? Personal bias perhaps.

That was my point. Are we now down to "I'm rubber, you're glue" school of argument?


All the best,
Nonoise

When I was learning to listen critically last year, someone (Darko?) suggested listening not only with focused attention, but to do a crossword puzzle (e.g.) while listening. Almost a "peripheral vision" kind of move.

Wow! thanks Hilde...

Very important observation...

The great biologist Wolfgang Schad wrote a book about Peripheral Seeing and his importance to identify form and function in nature...

The neuro psychiatrist writer Iain McGilchrist in " the Master and his emissary", a seminal book, distinguish TWO modes of attention, linked to TWO way to be in the world..."Peripheral attenton" and "focused attention"..

For sure we use these 2 modes at the same times ....

With the important fact that some people are more focused on details and other to the larger context....I cannot do anything than simplifying a 500 hundred pages book here...

To complete your example of the museum...

When we look "peripherally" we could become being conscious of the environment and the link to our own body could be thought on another level completely...

The inside of our body is a vast  world which could be related to the vast world  outside of the body by a  new geometry for example...This geometry exist by the way....I cannot describe it here in this post...

Then instead to think about an object in front of a body we may think about a " function" manifested simultaneously in 2 interrelated communicating  worlds....

Then Focus attention and Peripheral attention plays TOGETHER in an evolutive perceptive process...