Music: Notes Or Sounds ?

In all those years I was wondering why some Systems sound like the real thing and some - even ultra expensive - do something which have absolutely nothing to do with that. The more I thought about it the more I knew I have to think about that. The transmuting of a "happening in sound" into music necessarily involves the coming into play of a conscious faculty other than that of pure aural perception. And this can only be our faculty of feeling, an emotional activity which, in the case of the creative musician, gives an affective significance to the tonal structure he imagines, and which, in the case of the listener, rediscovers in these tonal structures the same affective significance that the creative musician found in them. Music, then, has its source not in sounds as such, but in the human psyche. It is not, as is too readily believed, a phenomenon of sound, an activity of feeling motivated by sounds which finds in tonal structures the possibility of expressing itself, just as our activity of thought finds the means of expressing itself in spoken language.

It is clear that such a phenomenon involves the coming into play of certain privileged sounds, which we call "musical sounds", as well as a certain tonal and rhythmic organization of these sounds which is the very condition of these musical tonal structures having the power of affective significance. But, as can be seen, all the data in sound brought to light by music acquire musical meaning only through the affective significance they have in a musical experience that is lived.
In other words, all musical data are affective data, rigorously related to acoustic data, BUT not determined by them. The proof of this is the fact that one and the same sound can, according to the circumstances, be considered by the musician as an F, an E sharp, or a G double flat, or that the same acoustical interval - the tritone for example, which consists of three whole tones - can be experienced, according to the circumstances , as an augmented fourth ( C to F sharp) or a diminished fifth (C to G flat), which is, affectively, very different.
So, music is not made with sounds, as is said only too often, but with notes and in general, with musical and NOT acoustic data, although these musical data are revealed by acoustic data.

All these facts have been known up till now without there having been any need to specify them in man's innate sense of music. Yet it appears necessary to me to bring them to light again in out time, because the manufacturers of the so-called "High End units" seem to have lost this innate sense of music.

For them ( and the "reviewers"), music is no longer the language of the heart (with some very few exceptions) but a language of sounds. They have abandoned the paths - tonal, rhythmic and even sonorous (for that they implement noises) - which has nothing to do with the reproduction of real sound in the listeners home. Their "music" is no longer the product of an activity of feeling but of their"intellect" (whatever that will be). They make it not with notes but with sounds and determine its structures by quantitative measures, both in the tonal and temporal sphere they fail.

This kind of "sound art" disconcerts the discriminated audiophile who asks himself in anguish whether this is still music, or whether he is the one who is no longer capable of following the historical evolution of our art.