I discovered after many years that by comparison with many others, I am a skilled listener...
Not because my hearing abilities are better at all... Without being deaf, I am old...
Not because I am a musician, not at all, Alas!...
I enjoy listening music through a good room and with a good audio system, which I learn how to create with my homemade experiments...
It takes me some times to realize why I can sense ,very swiftly, some minute differences with these ordinary hearing capabilities...
The answer is simple:
Each musical sound convey an emotional charge, positive or negative, and if the direct memory of the sound itself is very short lived, the indirect impact on the emotion is long lived in the memory.... Then when I recognized a sound , I dont keep the memory of a past sound pattern to compare it to a new one, because they are already gone and forgotten; I recognize inside me a satisfaction or a dissatifaction that goes on with the increase or a decrease of the S.Q. and his capacity to convey the rightful musicality and timbre...I can compare my past emotions to the new emotion, not a past sound to a new one at all....It is my brain- body which remember his feeling or the effect of the sound on itself, not the sound itself, then he enjoy an increase of S.Q. or not ....
Emotion is the thinking creative memory of music...
Without this unconscious emotional computer inside me it would had been impossible for me to experiment with my ears only and give to myself the conditions to create my audio system at all...
« My emotions are like numbers and my unconscious is the calculator» Groucho Marx