Science Shows There's Only One Real Way to Listen to Music

[antceleb12]

http://mic.com/articles/104250/what-...-love-of-music

Steve Jobs, the man who invented the iPod and ignited the digital music revolution, never listened to MP3s.

Instead, he only listened to vinyl. He felt there was something vacuous about listening to music in a digital form and was surprised at the success of his own product — that so many people had willfully traded quality "for convenience or price." He had good reason to be skeptical.

Digital doesn't hold up: Nothing about the way we listen to music these days commands attention like or yields the quality of a physical record. Though there is a movement back towards vinyl, there's an even bigger movement towards streaming — and with it, a whole new paradigm for how we hear music.

But it's clearer than ever before that the digital revolution has changed not only how we consume music but what music can do for and to us. Expert scientists have begun to explore the possibility that listening online might totally neuter music's power over listeners.

Their conclusion? It does. Powerfully.

"True love or appreciation for a piece of music ... comes with depth of knowledge of that music," she said. She cited three important factors in creating a genuine experience with a piece of music — "repeated exposure, iterations and intent" — which can be short-circuited in a "taste and go" environment. To her mind, though, the benefits of streaming in terms of access and broad music appreciation far outweigh the potential negative effects of streaming habits on our emotional experience.

"Those sorts of heightened emotional responses of pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction come in a way that is counter to rapid, quick streaming and constant exposure to a lot of different things," Crum said.

Skipping and listening inattentively, then, can get in the way of building those connections: "[It] wouldn't be experienced initially, and would bypassed very quickly in a sort of 'taste and go' streaming environment."

But that's exactly how we listen now. Recently collected Spotify data illustrates how short our musical attention spans have become. There's only about a 50% chance we'll actually make it to the end of a song. If people are barely listening to a song once all the way through, they're likely not returning to build those emotional connections. If they do, they might not have a foundational experience on which to form them.

Many music professionals have also discussed this lack of connection, and they blame the dwindling quality of audio files for it. When record companies digitally convert recorded music, which consumes a ton of data in its original form, they turn it into the much smaller MP3 format.

But this compressing process strips about 91% of the actual musical data and fills in the gaps using algorithms. The volume is then jacked up to make up for this lack of distinctiveness, and the resulting waveform is barely recognizable. Not only that, it can actually exhaust your ears to listen to it. It ends up looking like a solid brick of noise, as the following portion of the infographic "A Visual History of Loudness," created by designer Christopher Clark, shows.

Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer, believes this is one of the chief reasons people don't engage with albums as deeply anymore. "When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued," he told NPR. "You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again."

Research shows that musical quality has a huge effect on emotional response. A recent study performed by audio researchers at DTS divided a group of listeners into two groups — one that watched a video accompanied by standard stereo 96-kbps sound [[Spotify's default audio setting) and the other group listened in 256-kbps audio format. The responses in the brains of the group listening with the 256-kbps audio were 14% more powerful on metrics measuring memory creation and 66% higher on pleasure responses. And this was just 96 to 256 kbps.

Vinyl records are estimated to play at a whopping 1000 kbps. Music might not just have lost its revenue when it switched to digital; it may have lost its emotional power too.

What the future will hold: Though our ability to respond emotionally and intellectually to music has taken a hit in the move to digital, it's clear that music still holds a tremendous amount of power for people. We wouldn't need an unlimited streaming service if it didn't.

However, music's function may change as we move deeper in our increasingly digitized, technology-dominated world.

"Music may have been something we were more focused on in the past, an event we could allocate more attention to. It still exists in that way in some sense. Now it's becoming something we distribute our attention across," Crum told Mic. She believes that ubiquitous music enabled by streaming may actually become a vital tool in keeping us focused within a world that continues to fragment our attention spans.

But something will still be lost — not just the cover art on a vinyl, or the existence of a platinum album. What we lose with our new formats and habits for listening to music is a piece of ourselves; the musical part you keep in your heart, not your pocket.

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I'm not too knowledgable about all the technical details, but I must agree that the sound quality of vinyl is much more powerful than that of digital music.

[soulster]

I don't buy this, and I don't really like data-compressed music, but it's what I listen to [[320 kbps) in the car on road trips, and i'm mighty satisfied in listening.

I notice the article never even mentioned digital lossless like CD or hi-rez FLAC.

[arr&bee]

I usually just put a record on the turntable and let it play...works for me.