Evidence is nothing without judgments.—The Lord Leto Atreides II in God Emperor Of Dune, by Frank Herbert

In college, I majored in physics, but I took a lot of theater courses. Not acting—I never had any affinity for that—but all the other aspects of theater: set design, directing, theory of performance, playwriting. One professor, a playwright himself, offered some advice to his students that has served me well ever since: To learn the craft, observe your response first, then look to the text to figure out what about it caused you to respond the way you did.

It was an important way to learn about the playwright’s art, or nearly anything else: Pay attention both to your responses and to what, specifically, provokes them. Experience. Observe. Be systematic about it.

While intended for pedagogy, it’s essential advice for any serious critic, whether of theater or music or audio electronics. Look inward before looking outward. How does it make you feel? Why?

In the context of audio reviewing, the first part of that is often easier to achieve than the second. Different amplifiers, players, and loudspeakers produce subtly (or profoundly) different sounds, which provoke different feelings inside us. But why that specific response? Reacting is easy. Understanding your reaction requires a degree of self-reflection that’s neither comfortable nor easy. Even if you’re willing to engage in such self-reflection, answers don’t come easily.

This method—looking inward for a response and then outward for the cause—has a few implications that are worth considering.

Starting with responses and not with the sound itself focuses attention on the aspects of the sound that matter. Because good criticism is not just about listing characteristics: tight bass, airy highs, and so on.

Whether you’re an aspiring playwright, a theater critic, or an audio designer or reviewer, the validity of any approach depends on shared humanity. Ultimately, a playwright, composer, or designer isn’t interested in her or his own responses; their goal is to help others see, hear, and feel. Nothing a theater, music, or audio critic has to say is of any interest to others unless some part of the experience is shared.

The evidence is overwhelming that we do share much, even across languages and cultures. If we didn’t, art would fail. Music would fail. The fact that we can agree—most of us, or at least some of us—about the value of Beethoven’s Op.111 piano sonata or the Beatles’ Abbey Road means that we’re affected by many of the same things, in similar ways.

Which brings up the next interesting aspect of this respond-then-ask-why approach: It’s fundamentally qualitative. It’s about things we can agree on—things we can share—without needing quantitative, scientific proof. Which is not to say that quantitative testing is impossible. The genre of research famously performed by Floyd Toole and many others is an example of precisely that: a quantitative, rigorous, largely successful attempt to uncover patterns in human emotional response. It’s essential work: human preference made scientific. Its utter reliability is its great virtue.

But there’s a tradeoff. What it gains us in rigor and certainty, it gives up in specificity and incisiveness.

What do I mean by that? Two things. First, what’s measured is an average over a whole population, over all test subjects. Studying a population is necessary to achieve statistical significance—to be confident of the result to some stated precision—and to be certain your result has broad validity, beyond one individual. But what you learn from such research reveals little of interest about any individual in the group. Second, in most such studies, human emotional response is reduced to a single, blunt concept: Which one do you prefer?

What does that teach us about love, or fate, or the human response to mortality—about deeper human things that almost anyone can learn about by watching a play or listening to a great piece of music? Not much.

There is an alternative. The artist—including composers and musicians—can stir deep, human responses inside us, responses most of us share. We learn things about ourselves and our shared humanity. I find it interesting that musicians spend most of their practice time learning technique—but then rely, often intuitively, on shared humanity to put the piece across.

When my playwriting professor told me to look inside myself, then note my response, he wasn’t referring to such dull responses as “I like that speaker better than this one.” He was speaking of specific, profound things—questions and feelings that many of us share about what it means to be human.

We read, or look, or listen, and we feel less alone. But to embrace those responses—to be a part of the human race—we have no choice but to abandon certainty. There are things we know about ourselves and others—about what it means to be human—that we’ll never prove. We don’t need to prove it because we know it.

My background in science sensitizes me to these issues—which many readers and other reviewers may never question. The questions are worth asking, though, because there are people out there—very vocal people—who don’t understand this simple, basic fact. Yes, our field—reproduced music—is underpinned by science. But that doesn’t mean that the scientific approach to criticism is the only one that’s valid. Music reproduction is based in electronics, but music itself, and our experience of it, is based in shared humanity.

Stereophile exists in both worlds. Measurements belong in the world of evidence and certainty, though for different reasons than Floyd Toole’s work. Even there, though, humanity creeps in, in the way those measurements are interpreted.

The heart of this magazine, though, is in this other realm. It’s based on a faith in shared human experience, a belief that what’s true for the critic will be true for others, that humans share enough in common that not every insight requires proof. All that’s needed is a certain sensitivity, seriousness, and goodwill.

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