Critical listening and altered states


Ok, this is not a question about relaxing, but about listening to evaluate how the system (or a piece of gear is sounding).

What, in your experience, are the pluses and minuses of altering your state of mind for listening? This can include anything you've used to affect your everyday state of mind, from coffee, beer, scotch, tobacco, to much stronger — and psychoactive, dissociative — additives.

What do you gain by altering your consciousness in terms of what you notice, attend to, linger on, etc?
What causes more details to emerge?
What allows you to stick with a thread or, alternately, make new connections?

Or perhaps you like to keep all those things *out* of your listening; if that's you, please say a bit about why.

hilde45
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@mastering92
Umm..yes we are humans. We didn’t land here on a UFO space ship.
….We can grow organs and clone living things. Think about that for a minute. It seems you are too deep into the ocean of your own ideas to comprehend much else...

This is insulting. I cannot take more time to educate you. I’ve been thinking and writing about objectivity, ethics, scientific method, and more for 25 years. I've explained these things to thousands of reasonably well-educated students, but I admit that some are insulated from new thinking. Objectivity teaches me that there are brick walls when it comes to learning. And to my own ability to conjure up the right phrases for abject density.

Let’s agree to end this here; you can think I’m ignorant and I’ll do the same.
science cannot define art. music = art.

therefore all musical judgments are subjective.

OTOH ’sound’ can be measured and expressed objectively. the significance of those measurements in judging musical performance? that’s a matter of opinion.
@mikelavigne Exactly. We know the scientific structure for salt, but not for salty. As Aristotle pointed out, not everything affords exactitude.