On Christmas Eve of 2008, music journalist Michaelangelo Matos was fed up. The Internet and the rise of the MP3 had turned him into an audio glutton. He’d often find himself downloading numerous albums at a time, only for the majority of them to sit in his iTunes Library gathering dust while he played catch-up with the more recently-released music that he’d missed out on.
So he decided to do something about it.
He started a blog called ‘Slow Listening Movement’, and in his first post outlined his plan. “I need to clean out my ears. So from January to November 2009, I’m embarking on a kind of purification rite. In that time, I’m only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time; the next MP3 can only be downloaded once I listen to the first one.”
Although Matos wasn’t entirely successful in his quest, it set the wheels of change in motion. Readers and commenters on his blog were giving it a go themselves, and music critics from both sides of the Atlantic scrambled to pitch their own take on the idea. The Slow Listening Movement had become exactly that - a movement.
Slow Listening is primarily about limiting the amount of music that we consume, but it’s equally about learning how to really appreciate what we’re hearing, and High-Resolution Audio is working towards the same goals.
Nowadays, most of us listen to music while focusing on something else entirely - working out at the gym, cooking dinner or sifting through work - and so it rarely benefits from our undivided attention. But by encouraging people to swap their dull-sounding MP3s for High-Resolution Audio files, we think that true music lovers will reap the rewards of listening to their favourite tracks in uncompressed quality, while slowing down and taking everything in one track at a time.
“High-Resolution Audio touches you emotionally in a way that a lower-resolution, heavily-compressed music file simply cannot do,” says Eric Kingdon, technical marketing manager for Sony and our audio expert. “Music is really about being at one with the performance, and even if it’s very briefly, on a good system the walls can drop away, and just for that instance you can really, actually be there. And that makes it very special and worth paying.”
Eric is also a Slow Listening advocate, and believes that it can work in conjunction with High-Resolution Audio for the ultimate listening experience. “I’d go as far as to say that whether it’s High-Resolution Audio or not, [we should] take time to enjoy the music. Set aside some quiet period, or even if it’s not completely quiet as we live in a busy world today, just take some time where you can focus on what you’re listening to. You can really appreciate music much more by doing so, and the emotional experience will be so much more rewarding.”
We’ll admit it: High-Resolution Audio (and Slow Listening for that matter) isn’t for everyone. Many people are happy enough to let their music wash over them while they’re busy with something else, and that’s perfectly fine. But for those who want to dive head-first into their favourite music, High-Resolution Audio lets you plumb new depths.
