For sure between a necessary interpretative engagement in music listening, and a relax listening, and all the possible variations making us able to reach complete detachment and "no interpretation" at all of what we are listening to, exist many intermediary scales and attitudes and many hearing gestures......
But in general to begin with we must "interpret" if we want to choose what we want to listen to... And a baby learn to listen by exposure to some cultural musical attitudes to which he will relate to all his life...I remember how i listened to singing very young...
Only a yogi can listen beyond any relax attitude and interpretation, pure sound and pure silence, without even separating the 2....
For the "words" vocabulary conditioning problem:
The situation in audio, is most of the times a negative conditioning situation, because the "words" associated to sound most of the time HIDE the acoustic meaning and the musical meaning and experience.... It is more a consumer programmation or conditioning by the market pressure to sell tube and S.S. amplifiers for example, and to gather people around their specific attributed and alleged superior sonic qualities...Same goes for dac or speakers types...
But we cannot focus on acoustic and music by focusing on amplifier, dac and speakers difference only...
On the contrary, when the audio system is chosen, then we listen to the acoustical rendering of the music in a specific room....The audio system must disapear and with it all the vocabulary linked to it: warm, cold, neutral, accurate,colored...How is it possible? By acoustic and psycho-acoustic treatment and control specifically adapted for the chosen gear and making all musical sound natural and approximating a lived event...
The micro structure "volume" of a tonal timbre playing gesture by a musician in the larger "volume" of our room, is never understandable or graspable, in solely and merely with words like "warm", "cold" , "neutral" , "accurate" or "colored" qualities so much than by musically and acoustically meaningful vocabulary linked to acoustic experiments and musical experience first ...
We cannot interpret music experience with the engineering description of an amplifier sound first and last....
It is the reason why people comparing and reviewing gear never adress the basic method by which we can optimally embed the gear in their mechanical, electrical and acoustical working dimensions... They sell a ready made material product supposed to be PERFECT not a way and a method to install it the right way...
The sound of a piano in an acoustically controlled room, is not, warm, cold, accurate, neutral....His timbre qualities are way too much detailed and complex to be reduced to this vocabulary....Same thing is true about an orchestra and the acoustic description of his manifestation in a room...
