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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Accuracy vs. Musicality (and YMMV)
Post Subject: It's not a collapse, it's the oppositePosted by N-set on: 1/21/2026
 Romy the Cat wrote:
 I never described at my site “those moments” and I do not think that the value of the moments could be understood from listening music. 

Your posts/videos is the only place, apart from the philosophical/spiritual literature, I've seen a precise description of those moments (or events), very close to how I feel them.  No, their value is in themselves only and in nothing else. Music can help igniting them, which is exactly what you are saying below:
 Romy the Cat wrote:
 Music can serve as an initiator of a conscious stream, a structured sequence that catalyzes awareness, perhaps even guiding possibility into experience. But the conscious stream does not belong to music. There is a subtle and essential decoupling between musical intention—the attempt to evoke consciousness—and the consciousness that arises in response. Music may open the door, but what passes through it is no longer musical in nature.  

Bingo! 
 Romy the Cat wrote:
I am a little afraid that Jarek, after reading the end of my last post, will reply, “Roman, what you are describing is just a sequential collapse of the wave function in quantum field” Jarek might be a thousand times wrong about cables elevators, but he would be right about that. There are millions of mysteries in this field, but missing the biggest one is inexcusable: how the fuck did Bach, three hundred years ago, without knowing any of this, operate flawlessly at that level?

Collapse, however mysterious the process is (I've spent past 10+ yrs on that and counting),  is in a sense boring - the coherence is lost inevitably. I see those moments as the opposite - there is a large scale coherence built, coherence with your own self, with your past, with the universe. This is closer to entanglement - quantum coherence of many parts making them inseparable, coherence that seems to exist beyond the space and time.
You can hate me for that, but I don't think Bach operated at any higher spiritual level, more like he operated in local Kneipen. " But this doesn't matter. If his music elevates the listener, all the rest are details. For me it doesn't work. "Too intellectual" did not have the tone I wanted in light of Rowuk's comment. More like "too little heart". 
And Bach and math, or in general music and math - I'm not directly in the subject but close to it thanks to two colleagues from work, with one I share the office, concerts, and music discussions.  Recently heard a lecture of apparently a renown mathematician in the field, Lane Hughston, and it was rather pathetic. I think the whole field suffers from the same sickness that Romy has identified and been exposing in audio for two decades now: lack of correlation between mathematical structures that people try to see in music and our perceptions. Assigning e.g. group theory structures to chord combinations tells as much about how we perceive those chords as cable elevators tell about the sound. I've heard about someone who recently ran machine algorithm through all Bach's work looking for those group-theory related chords and found only about 2-3% of them in total. But my office colleague did make some interesting small discovery, connecting math and known facts about our tone perception, I'll share it when it's published.

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