Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially though—for me at least—it’s about visions in the mind’s eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers.

As I walk about my garden under the dome of city noise and sky, the mixed sounds that enter my brain are of two types: those whose source is within my field of vision, and those I can’t see directly but can still picture in my mind. Every time I hear a jet passing overhead, I’m aware of “seeing” a jet without looking up.

My partner, bb, says I didn’t actually see that jet—the one that made the noise. She says I see a composite of all the jets I’ve watched pass south to north on their descent to LaGuardia Airport. I wonder, how does she know? Maybe I did see that jet. When I ask bb why my mind sees a jet, she says, “It’s a survival thing.”

If I hear a siren, depending on the pitch and timbre of its sound, I “see” a firetruck, an ambulance, or a police car. My brain routinely and effectively converts distant sounds into clear moving pictures that skip briefly through my consciousness, interrupting my awareness of whatever I was previously observing.

Except for the occasional racket of chickens fussing or bees buzzing, the garden itself is quiet. Except for the occasional jet passing or siren screaming, my listening room is quiet in that same, contemplation-inducing way, especially at night. In my listening room, most of the sounds I convert to pictures pulse from a pair of foot-tall boxes that guard the entrance to a rack of audio hardware and a volume of cluttered space wherein I’ve seen whole operas, jazz acts in smoky basement clubs, the stage at Woodstock, monks chanting in temples, and drummers in front of desert tents. For me, the main excitement of audiophile audio lies in the magic picture shows it presents.

No matter how much I jabber on in my columns and reviews about the “sound of sound,” the “intensity of sound,” or the “beauty of sound,” what I am experiencing—what dominates my attention—is some manner of audio holography that rouses me to imagine I am “watching” some event taking place somewhere.

For example: When I listen to “Balloon Payment,” the first track on The Ready Made Boomerang by Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Band, I am always looking out from a microphone set at the same height as, and maybe 3′ away from, an inflated, dark-gray balloon mounted on a black tripod framed by the rusty-orange iron wall of the empty, million-gallon steel cistern (dubbed “the Cistern Chapel”) that this track (and the rest of the album) was recorded in. As the recording starts, I savor the attack of the initial, gunshot-like pop and that first loud whoosh of escaping air. After that, I track every reverberating millisecond of these sounds’ 44-second echo-decay.

It is only when I stop picturing, step back, and ask myself why a recording is so captivating (or not) that I begin noticing sound as physical energy pulsing from my speakers. When that happens, I have stepped out of my lucid-listening consciousness and into my empirical-observation consciousness. But even in my most empirical listening mode, my mind is still picturing the textures, force, and viscosity of the energy I’m observing.

Parenthetically: Listening to live music is more intensely physical, more conspicuously there all around me. My direct view of the musicians dominates my awareness, alongside the full, body-stimulating force of the pulsing soundfield. At a live concert, I picture less but see more. While I play records, my brain continuously maps the spatial coordinates of the performers I’m observing. I can point to their vaporous holograms. The perimeters of these séance-like scenes are presented to my eyes as shadowy “places” worthy of scrutiny.

On the surface, this type of aural-visual experience seems like nothing more than shallow entertainment, and often it is only that. But in my room, with the recordings I choose, these ritualistic listening-picturing experiences are much like reading books or studying paintings.

I listen to a lot of field recordings made by ethnomusicologists because I like the types of music these simply miked, unedited performances present, and because the soundspaces in these recordings are real: typically a small church, a front porch, or the dining room of a wood-frame house. The sounds of the walls and floor and trucks driving by are as real and present as the singers and their instruments. It helps that on field recordings the microphone’s view (and therefore the listener’s view) closely resembles that of a camera lens.

My experiences with attentive listening have led me to believe that “picturing” is the main thing our senses were engineered to accomplish. My partner bb says that picturing helps us monitor our safety and regulate energy in our minds.

If these hypotheses are true, then listening to reproduced recorded music may be a cultured manifestation of an important human-evolutionary process—a ritualized, high-level form of integrated learning. Close listening is a solitary, meditative act of cultural exploration. To me, the raison d’être for audiophile audio.

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