TBH I was picking up more references by goat to his personal likes and dislikes, ie preferences, than...
...that he actually meant realism. Which moves the argument from the subjective to the objective. And since he gave your post a 'like', you might be right.
However, calling it realism is an even bigger error, and I will explain.
The perfect segue into my continuation point, thank you.
When musicians perform in public, they are very strictly constrained by the situation. There are relatively few of them, and they are the object of desire and attention for a large number of people in an audience, sometimes an extremely numerous audience. There is little alternative than to plant the musicians in a spot, often a safe spot, but also a spot whereby they can communicate to one another when playing, and spread the audience out from that point. In a hall, the audience is spread in a long block fronting the stage where the musicians play. In an arena, the audience, being even more numerous, needs to be spread in a gigantic circle around the musicians assembled on a relatively tiny stage, and the perceived angle of the musical source can actually approach a point source. To call this state of affairs realism strikes me as overreach.
Getting used to this necessary but strict constraint is a matter of conditioning. Nothing more. It is simply another excellent example of the conditioning that I have been describing, unrelated to objective realism or naturalness. There is as much logic to the realism argument as to the argument that automatic car transmissions are more realistic and natural than manual car transmissions, because we only have two feet. In fact, the number of feet argument has more merit to it than the constrained music presentation angle argument.
However, when the audience is numbered one, or a small handful, the musicians and the sound engineers getting the music to this audience are not constrained by the mass audience constraints (and they are nothing more than constraints). Creative opportunities open up for new modes of musical presentation, and they are every bit as realistic or natural as the deeply constrained modes limited by the situation of a mass audience. (Our hearing organism is highly developed to detect, interpret, appreciate and react with emotion, to sounds originating from every direction. It could be argued less realistic and less natural to constrain it.) The musicians, and the sound engineers, have never in the past had this opportunity to present their music for an audience of one with a full three-dimensional palette. Rather than being unrealistic or unnatural, it is actually something new, but just as realistic and natural as any other, but with greater opportunities for greater creativity. And as I highlighted in my earlier post, conditioning is the enemy of the flourishing of this new mode, and is also the enemy of the audience itself benefiting from the new creativity and new modes of expression on offer.
The key point that I've been trying to make, and to which some seem to be unnecessarily resistant, is that conditioning is not the same as innate preference. And understanding this difference is actually important. When one doesn't understand it, one thinks that one has some innate locked preference that one doesn't actually have (one might even attempt to post-rationalise the conditioning as 'realism'), and doesn't realise that unlocking it is a genuine opportunity for oneself to move into new modes of experience with new rewards. And that as long as one remains locked in by the conditioning, one is in essence deprived, and unnecessarily so. I'm trying to raise awareness here.
cheers
