music , mind , thought and emotion

I liked your ear-definition, Onhwy61!
speach, screams, thuds, winds or ANY sounds including music represent a data for ear to be transfered to the brain. A musical instrument can be called a transmitter of music if operated by musician into our brains and certainly musician's as well.
There are even some exceptions that took place in our history: for example Beethoven is considered to be a composer and musician who later-on became deaf and was only receiving very very little information from ear to the brain or let's say through vibrations occured in the piano cover to his head.
Nowdays not only musicians exist with musical instruments or voices as primary sources, but there are secondary as well: recording and reproducing equipment...

No tickets...! (Indiana Jones - The last Crusade). Hahaha... Sorry, can't help it. Hahaha...Hahaha... HAHAHA...HAHAHA...

I think of the mind as a pattern recognition/recall device. External sensory stimulation is filtered, manipulated, discarded and/or saved. Music is not the air fluctuation picked up by our senses, but instead is the patterns constructed within our minds. Whether it's listening to a live performance, sitting in front of your hi-end system, reading a score from sheet music or simply recalling a particular song from memory, the music can only take place within the mind. The external, or in the case of memory, internal stimulus triggers the pattern recognition/recall appartus into operation and the relationships between pitch and rhythm over time is created/discerned.

One conclusion of this way of thinking is that you don't need audiophile grade equipment to fully enjoy music. There's no reason that for any given person that a Bose Wave radio could not excite the same mind patterns as a vinyl driven Sound Lab system. The link between the stimulus and the mental patterns generated is arbitrary.

Onhwy61, I am looking forward to the day when I can fill in the blanks and expand the sound from any source with my mind alone. That is, perhaps, the ultimate goal toward which we should all strive. I suspect that many other things would also fall in place with that sort of discipline. I am not saying this "tongue in cheek". You are absolutely correct. At the same time, I don't believe my capabilities are there -- even though it would make my life so much easier ;-)

I read once that motorcycle racers engaged in a 24 race actually found it easier to race during the night. Their lap times went down during the dark hours. One racer commented that in the dark you are forced to focus on the area illuminated by the headlights and all other visual info is eliminated. With the elimination of background distraction performance improved. In some ways all the audiophile minutae (soundstage, coherence, transparency, imaging, etc.) is non-essential information when listening to music. This is a possible explanation for why so many professional musicians don't become audiophiles. Is it possible that their highly cultivated musical capabilities allows their minds to create music (in the listening sense) more easily than the average audiophile?