I certainly do - audio has been a significant "hobby" for me since assembling my first HiFi system around a used 20w Bell vacuum tube amplifier as a high school student in Chicago in 1958.
Hobbies can be valuable parts of our lives involving distractions from our work and/or anxieties, and providing pleasant relief - or they can be obsessions that have a profound negative effect on the personality and mental health of some people. It is my observation that most ASR regulars and visitors have a healthy relationship with this hobby, but we do get occasional visitors who are in the angry aggressive (or passive-aggressive) category which almost always leads to contentious threads with endlessly repeated bogus information and ludicrous claims. Occasionally, we even get well credentialed visitors with strong academic backgrounds in science and engineering who have obviously fallen into the morass of illogical and unsupported audiophile foolishness.
In addition to my interest in audio and love of music, I have a deep interest in the relationship of humans to the world we live in - from "human-nature relationships" to "human-technology relationships". My formal background in human interactions with their environments includes several college courses in psychology and sociology, and training and certification as a neuropsychiatric technician in the U.S. Navy.
People who are interested in audio and music reproduction include a spectrum that spans a range from casual interest in the methods and styles of assembling audio (music reproduction) systems, to a pathological compulsive hobby involving a fierce and often angry defending of illogical, non-scientific "beliefs" and a total lack of knowledge about how our sensory inputs and brains interact. The "denial" of the peer-reviewed findings of psychoacoustics professionals is certainly as powerful as the denial of AGW/CC (anthropogenic global warming and climate change), another psychology-based topic that interests me greatly.
After reading a couple of ASR threads this morning, I started thinking about the role of music in the lives of people living in the modern, high-tech world, .
At first thought, I considered three primary ways we listen to music - with most of us here falling into groups 2 and 3:
Hobbies can be valuable parts of our lives involving distractions from our work and/or anxieties, and providing pleasant relief - or they can be obsessions that have a profound negative effect on the personality and mental health of some people. It is my observation that most ASR regulars and visitors have a healthy relationship with this hobby, but we do get occasional visitors who are in the angry aggressive (or passive-aggressive) category which almost always leads to contentious threads with endlessly repeated bogus information and ludicrous claims. Occasionally, we even get well credentialed visitors with strong academic backgrounds in science and engineering who have obviously fallen into the morass of illogical and unsupported audiophile foolishness.
In addition to my interest in audio and love of music, I have a deep interest in the relationship of humans to the world we live in - from "human-nature relationships" to "human-technology relationships". My formal background in human interactions with their environments includes several college courses in psychology and sociology, and training and certification as a neuropsychiatric technician in the U.S. Navy.
People who are interested in audio and music reproduction include a spectrum that spans a range from casual interest in the methods and styles of assembling audio (music reproduction) systems, to a pathological compulsive hobby involving a fierce and often angry defending of illogical, non-scientific "beliefs" and a total lack of knowledge about how our sensory inputs and brains interact. The "denial" of the peer-reviewed findings of psychoacoustics professionals is certainly as powerful as the denial of AGW/CC (anthropogenic global warming and climate change), another psychology-based topic that interests me greatly.
After reading a couple of ASR threads this morning, I started thinking about the role of music in the lives of people living in the modern, high-tech world, .
At first thought, I considered three primary ways we listen to music - with most of us here falling into groups 2 and 3:
- In the background as added "ambience",
- Dedicated listening (focused on and absorbed in the music)
- Audiophile style "critical listening (listening to the sound rther than the essence of the music)
a 2016 two-pronged study conducted by Sonos and Apple Music, in part with the help of neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. The first part of the study involved an online and global survey of 30,000 smartphone users, aged 18–79, all of whom lived with at least one other person, which explored how listening to music together affects their lives. Among the interesting discoveries: 71% of households who engaged in what Levitin terms "communal listening" saw a marked increase in kids helping with cleaning. On the adult side, 59% of people reported finding others more attractive if they liked and listened to the same music, and couples reported having twice as much sex.