I understand what is meant when people talk about an emotional vs cerebral type of listening, and I have two points to make about that, which you may find interesting.
1) It’s never either/or. No person is 100% one or the other. That’s not how human brains work. We all have our unique configurations, leaning more one way than the other, but both emotions and abstract thinking are regularly involved in the human experience.
2) Why do people like to physically attend a live show? Sure, they like the natural sound, the social engagement, the sensory stimulation, the thrill, and the feeling of doing something special.
But they also go to *watch* the musicians perform in a 3D space, and not *just* to listen to the sound. Even a blind person at a live music event can perceive, probably with extraordinary accuracy, the sense of space within which the performance is happening, as well as the locations of the sounds inside that space. This is one of the reasons why I prefer smaller, intimate venues over gigantic productions.
When we listen to recorded music on 2 channel systems at home, all this talk about "imaging" and "soundstaging" is important to people precisely for the same reason. The experience desired is that of being "as if" we are actually watching it, in addition to listening to it. People live in three dimensions, we experience life in three dimensions, and so we naturally want to have an inner sense of space and dimensionality when we listen to and feel the music that we love.