Don’t worry, I’m not going to be asking you to perform a séance before playing your music. Mostly not, anyway. Requests like that are usually reserved for the April 1st Muse Intros. However, much about our brains and hearing lends itself to a bit of mysticism. This is because, as most of you know by now, hearing doesn’t take place in your ears. Our individual “hearing” takes place in the brain. Normal hearing occurs when electrical signals are generated by your ears, and your brain processes those electrical stimuli to create sounds. But your brain doesn’t need your ears to hear.
The Neosensory company developed a haptic hearing aid device that is worn on your wrist and vibrates as it detects sounds in your environment. These wrist vibrations allow you to train your brain to translate the vibrations into
sounds that you
hear, mainly as a clarifying enhancement to whatever hearing you already have. And for many decades, we have had Cochlear implants, small wearable electronic devices that directly stimulate the auditory nerves of people who have lost the function of their ears for that stimulation. But those who have received the cochlear implants after losing their hearing report that the devices create sounds that resemble mechanical, robotic, static. Individuals have to train their brains to interpret that static so that their brains perceive the stimulations as sounds they can recognize as speech, music, or whatever the
sound would be for people with normal hearing capabilities. So yes, we can train our brains to meaningfully hear that static in a way that is similar to how our brains were trained to hear and recognize a violin, a piano, or someone's voice. Your brain has the final say on how something
sounds to you, but you can be the trainer of your brain. Pretty cool.
This is where ritual comes in as a trainer of your brain. Can you train your brain to hear low-fidelity so that it sounds like high-fidelity? Maybe not. But also, yes, a little, as the users of Cochlear implants have to do to get their new sounds to match their memories of the natural sounds they once heard. This article will not ask you to do that, though that can happen unintentionally when you listen as a routine.
For our purposes, we need to differentiate
ritual from
routine. Although routines and rituals share many of the same actions, the distinction between them lies in their ends. To wit: Whereas the goal of a routine is to make a behavior automatic, the goal of a ritual is to make it intentional.
Routine is the way your brain hears that high-fidelity sound in your system even as your tubes begin to fail, or your stylus wears out, or your power company delivers dirty electricity to your home at peak use times of the day. Your brain expects to hear a certain quality of sound from your system, and, as a function of the continuity illusion and auditory induction, your auditory cortex presents to your consciousness the experience it thinks should be associated with the diminished input it receives.
The mechanism of this process within the brain is not well understood, though it is repeatedly demonstrable in test settings. And here I will repeat: your task of creating a listening ritual is not intended to have your brain convince you that your system sounds better than it does. Instead, a listening ritual should cause your brain to be more focused, so that you are hearing everything your system is delivering for a better high-fidelity experience.
Placing a bit of intention into our listening can reconnect us with what drew us to audiophilia in the first place. The technology that lets us press play and hear an endless stream of music curated either from our digital library, a streaming service, or an A.I. algorithm is useful and easily enjoyed, but it can have the effect of dulling our appreciation of the quality of the musical reproduction. This is the same thing that would occur if you drank your favorite Champagne every day. Over time, your experience would diminish due to repetition. Our brains need variety as a means of comparison. There is no good without bad, or a lesser good. Fortunately for shoppers of used audio gear, this brain preference ensures a well-supplied inventory. But that’s another topic.
Back to the ritual. When listening to my better system now, I will take a few minutes to choose the music I want to hear, whether it’s selecting a particular vinyl record or two, or pulling up or creating a new playlist in Roon. If I am going to play a vinyl record, I might begin my preparation by spinning a record without really listening, just to wake up my cartridge. This will also give the electronics time to warm up and optimize the sound I will be hearing. And there are the usual
routines of record-playing that can become
rituals, like the cleaning of the records and the stylus that you can now incorporate as part of your ritual to prepare your brain for a better sonic experience. You may already
routinely do these tasks to get better sounds, but to create your sound-enhancing
ritual, you need to do them with the intention of getting that better sound. Next, you can make sure your listening spot is positioned properly. Silence your phone and place it away from you so that you will not be distracted. With all of this preamble out of the way, your brain is now primed for your attentive listening. Listening, not with an ear for critiquing your system, but with the intent of fully enjoying the music being created in your listening space.
One thing I recently started doing to heighten my listening ritual is to give up using my big downstairs system for casual listening. I have long noticed that if the room is filled with high-quality sound, my brain has difficulty doing tasks at the same time if those tasks require focused attention. Tasks like working on electronics, writing, or even reading a book. The same was true for tasks in my kitchen, which enjoys a proximity to my downstairs system. But lately, I have found that I have been able to ignore the better sound and focus on meal prep and cooking. It turns out that I had been training my brain to ignore the better sound quality of musical reproduction. The solution for that, for casual listening, is that I now use an inexpensive Sonos device that sits on my kitchen counter. The Sonos acts as a Roon endpoint and also accepts casting from any of the other music or radio apps on my phone. I can enjoy the music without my brain having to choose between focusing on following or creating a recipe and being captivated by the higher-resolution music that is competing for my attention. And sure, you might think you can multitask, but all studies on that topic clarify that the brain can only shift between multiple tasks and not give equal attention to them at the same time.
General ritualization steps also work for tape or digital playback. For a focused listening session, you are not sitting down to engage with a random piece of music. You are opening that high-priced bottle of Champagne in the guise of your carefully selected audio gear. You will not be pairing your listening with some unexpected track that might interrupt your focused listening enjoyment. Discovering music is my favorite part of being an audiophile, but I can discover new music by listening to the radio, visiting a friend, or hearing something in my car. If I hear something I like that I want to investigate further, I can save the track to one of my folders in Roon, or take a picture with my phone of the track/artist, and listen at a later time on one of my more revealing systems.
Do I do all of the above ritual steps all of the time? No. And maybe you can’t choose a ritualization exercise because you don’t have anything to listen to besides your One Big Beautiful System, and you just want to listen to it all day while you are doing other things. There is nothing wrong with that. We all know that the real world and work can all too easily get in the way of our enjoyment of many things in life. But if you would like to get a more focused appreciation of whatever audio gear you already have, ritualizing your music listening might give you that experience. Just remember, your brain is amazing! You can use your brain to help you more fully enjoy your music. Without your brain, any vibrations that reach your ears would just be vibrations turned into electrical signals that go nowhere.
And, if these suggested rituals fail to help you more fully enjoy your music system, you can always resort to performing a séance. Light a candle and some incense, and add some curated mumbo jumbo to get you on your way.
Spirits of recorded music, from the grooves, let the needle sing. Masters of the tape, unwind your magnetic tracks. Summon the streams and bring the digital codes to life. Amplifiers awaken the ghosts in the wires. Let the speakers breathe and haunt this room with glorious sounds!
Let me know if any of this works for you.