How do we actually know what music sounds like?

I was at this concert last night and I started thinking about how everyone in that room probably heard something completely different because of their ear shape and brain chemistry which is wild when you consider that we all share the same recording but our perceptions are fundamentally subjective. This reminds me of my grandfather who used to play his old harmonica every Sunday morning while sitting on the porch swing -- he would close his eyes and describe music as colors, like a minor key was dark purple and a major chord was golden yellow, which is such an interesting way to process sound. I remember one summer we spent all afternoon trying to figure out what color blues sounded like and my grandmother insisted it was silver because the notes had a sharp metallic edge that cut through everything else. We never did find the answer but that conversation stuck with me more than any music theory class ever could, which makes me wonder if our musical preferences are less about technique and more about emotional association built over decades of personal experience tied to specific people and places -- my mother always cried when she heard a certain piano piece from her childhood in Prague, not because the melody was sad but because that song lived in a house with someone who wasn't there anymore. So really music isn't sound waves at all it is memory organized into frequency

I've been thinking about this too. The neuroscience side is fascinating.

Well I've always thought about this because my dad was a jazz drummer in his twenties and he used to say that you don't hear what music is, you hear what your brain translates it into based on every song you've already heard which sounds like the Shepard tone effect where each layer keeps rising but never actually getting any higher. It's kind of like when I was eight years old and my neighbor had this huge system in his garage and he would play Led Zeppelin at three in the morning and I used to sit on the porch with my head between my knees trying to figure out if I could hear everything or just some version of it that sounded different from what everyone else heard. That's probably where the seed came from, this obsession with whether there's a shared reality for sensory experiences because once you start asking questions about perception you can never go back and you end up in philosophy which is fun until four am and you realize your brain just makes guesses based on previous patterns to save energy. But that's basically what all cognition is doing, shortcutting the raw data into something usable by comparing it against a database of past experiences so when Mozart plays I'm not hearing a new frequency range I'm recognizing the architecture he built and my brain is filling in the gaps with everything I already know about western tonal systems. The question isn't what music sounds like because that depends entirely on who's listening but rather how our brains construct reality from incomplete data which applies to music and politics and basically every aspect of being a human alive at any given moment trying to make sense of signals without the full picture

This is such a wild rabbit hole to go down. I keep thinking about how everyone's internal representation of "C major" or even basic rhythm probably differs based on what they grew up listening to, and we just call it the same thing anyway because we agree on labels.

this is wild to think about because it's so intuitive — you hear something, your brain processes it, and you know what "C major" or a cello texture sounds like. but technically we have no way of verifying that the subjective experience matches the objective signal. this is basically a version of Mary the color scientist problem applied to every sound on earth.

the closest thing we get to an answer are psychoacoustic models — the ear's frequency response (cochlear basilar membrane modeling), interaural time differences for localization, and how our cortex integrates those into pitch perception. so we know what music SOUNDS like internally with remarkable precision, but that knowledge is forever locked inside the listener's head. there's no

This is such a trippy rabbit hole to go down because it makes you realize how much of our experience with sound is just brain interpretation rather than objective reality — like, do birds hear music or are they hearing frequency patterns that we've evolved to perceive as structure? The same goes for what 'beautiful' even means in this context.

well i think it comes down to psychoacoustics and how our auditory cortex processes frequency relationships into pitch, which is fascinating because sound technically doesn't have a quality of 'music,' just vibrations at different amplitudes — what we call music is the brain organizing those patterns in time. My uncle used to do this thing where he would sit on his porch with an old radio tuned between stations and try to find every station that was audible, which I found incredible because it meant all these stations existed simultaneously as electromagnetic waves and our perception just selected one based on signal strength and tuning — the universe is literally full of music we can't hear. He had this 1974 Ford Fiesta that he used to say sounded like a cello when you drove over cobblestones, which i mean sounds absurd but there's actually science behind how different textures produce resonant frequencies. I think about him sometimes in my dad's funeral service because the priest was playing Rachmaninoff and it felt wrong — like music wasn't supposed to sound that beautiful at a death -- and i realized then that our emotional response to music is partly learned, partially evolutionary, which means we can actually rewire how we hear things through exposure.

I keep coming back to the idea that sound is literally just your brain doing math on pressure changes in air, which is wild when you think about it. Your cochlea has thousands of tiny hair cells that physically bend under different frequencies and trigger electrical signals at different rates — it's a physical transduction from mechanical energy to neural code. Then your auditory cortex decodes those patterns into what we experience as pitch, timbre, rhythm. So every time I listen to my favorite album through the speakers in my garage, my brain is essentially reconstructing an abstract representation of air vibrations based on hardware that evolved for locating predators and finding food. The tech side of this thread gets interesting too — lossy compression like MP3 literally throws away frequencies your ear can'

I think people underestimate how much of this question is actually about the physics of pressure waves versus the psychology of perception and it gets weirder than most realize because if you ask a deaf person to describe music they're usually describing rhythms through vibration which means their subjective experience isn't wrong it's just different from the auditory pathway we assume as baseline for what "music" is, but then I keep thinking about this one summer in high school when my neighbor had a stereo and would play these really heavy rock records at like 3 AM every night and I used to lie awake staring at the ceiling tracing the shape of the drum beats with my hand on the wall because the bass was vibrating through the shared wall so clearly and that's basically what music is — it's just air molecules being pushed around in a specific pattern and our brains evolved to find meaning in those patterns, though I don't know if we can ever truly say two people hear the same song identically since every cochlea has different ear canal resonances and neural processing pathways vary wildly based on past exposure and cultural context which would mean music is fundamentally subjective even at its most objective level of being physical waves.