Music is mainly the organization of Silence…

To listen… few humans listen.
Most of the time they only hear.

To listen is to be vigilant.
Doing only that. Not reading, not surfing the Net, not tinkering with something. Just listening, with all senses open…
Not only perceiving sounds, but decoding them. Assigning them meaning, seeking their deeper significance. Allowing resonances to blossom deep inside us.

To listen is to be available.
Opening ourselves to the music. Dropping our masks, leaving our worries behind. Being truthful with ourselves.

To listen is to learn.
To discover every day new sounds, new harmonies, from all over the world.

To listen is to share.
More than words, music is a universal language. It creates bridges between objects and humans.

To listen is to understand.
Music and sounds—coming from people, objects, nature—connect us to the deepest mysteries of existence.

Everything “speaks to us”: the songs of the whales, the wind in the trees, the babbling rivers, the waves rolling on the shore, human music. This is only a small part of the great symphony of life, lest we forget?

Listen to a film score without the images…
Now, watch a film without the soundtrack.
A simple little experiment that reminds us just how essential hearing is to us.

Never forget: if our ears do not have “ear lids”, it is because Life has decided it should be so. Sight, so favoured today, is actually “framed.” Our audition stretches like a sphere around us, and reaches a lot further.
For us in this industrial world, whose lives are alienated, disconnected from nature, numbed by mechanical excess, to listen is to live again.
Concretely, how does this all apply to High-Fidelity?

We must stop merely dissecting sounds for the fascination they hold over us. This aesthetic has its merits and can indeed offer beautiful moments of pleasure, but it is not an end in itself. Our main guideline should be the ability of our sound systems to help us experience and assimilate the emotions and teachings contained in the music.
To reach this, a listening methodology becomes handy.
First and foremost, we should integrate the notions of objective and subjective, of rigor and poetry. A key book, simple and clear on these subjects, is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Many audiophiles choose their products based on highly subjective grounds (blind loyalty to brands, trends, preconceptions on various technological choices), all while convincing themselves they’re being rational; then they listen “like audiophiles,” using their logical brain.
The reverse would be better: one must “keep a cool head” when it comes to audio products; they are merely technical objects, sometimes magnificent in themselves, but above all, they serve one thing: the Art of Music.
The excessive fascination with technological objects is one of the failings of our “civilization”; it’s the behaviour of spoiled and lost children, who focus on “having” rather than “being.”

Putting together a system should be done in a calm, rational and simple manner. One should evaluate a component the same way they would evaluate a piano… or a nice meal.
For instance, when evaluating a piano, no one, from the beginner to the accomplished musician, is naïve enough to ask what tension is applied to the strings, what brand of felt is used for the hammers, or at what temperature the varnish is applied.
The buyer plays the piano, listens… and decides.
It’s the same with a prepared dish: do we need to ask the chef the brand of their knives, their ovens, or whether they chopped the vegetables first? No—the overall judgment is based on the result.

When listening, the music must “speak to the senses.” It should move us, transport us, teach us, wash away our worries, and much more…

We must be in harmony with our emotions, open-minded, and receptive. The secret is to evaluate a system with the mental language of a musician, not that of an audiophile. As long as we’re analyzing the treble range, for example, we’re not connected to the musical content, but to its “surface.”

To achieve this harmony, the best option still resides in regularly attending live music concerts. Should access to a good concert hall be out of reach, a simple street musician will do. Listening to unamplified instruments, including voices, of which our brain keeps a reliable and indelible impression, is usually preferred to amplified instruments, as it is not tainted by a layer of electronic reproduction.

As in all genuine quests, the search for a sound system is a never-ending process. As Taoists would say, the goal matters little; it’s the journey that is beautiful!

Pascal Ravach

The Art of Listening is the translation of a text
I wrote in French at the beginning of the 1980s
to explain my approach to High Fidelity…
I decided to have it re-published it its original form to preserve its freshness.
Considering our growing obsession with technology,
I believe it remains just as relevant today…