Jazz listening: Is it about the music? Or is it about the sound?

Is sex about the sensations and release? Or about the communication, intimacy, closeness?
Is food about the interesting textures and flavors and how they're put together? Or is it about the emotional and physical satisfaction that results?
Are movies about the pacing, plot, and character development? Or about the immersion, excitement, and adrenaline burst?
To answer one or the other or both or neither is a good Rorschach test for members. It answers a question, "How should one live?" (Those who claim "both" are just as subjective as those who say one or the other, by the way. What they mean is, "For me, both!")

My MRI of the question reveals a philosophical question (as well as a personal and practical one). (And it's not "truly" a philosophical question -- that's just how I take it.)

Kierkegaard wrote a book about this basic question, entitled "Either/Or" in which he portrays two life views. From good ol' Wikipedia:

"The aesthetic is the personal, subjective realm of existence, where an individual lives and extracts pleasure from life only for their own sake. In this realm, one has the possibility of the highest as well as the lowest. The ethical, on the other hand, is the civic realm of existence, where one's value and identity are judged and at times superseded by the objective world.'

@mijostyn

sound quality and the music itself are both examples of the aesthetic and become purely a matter of taste.

Excellent point. I do think taste is more objective than that famous quote intends, as we have so many points on which we agree and even have reasons and arguments about taste. Then again, I don't think objectivity means what most think it means. [Tables topic.]

I’m sorry the Kierkegaard quote mentioned "ethics." Misplaced word in this discussion.

The better contrast is between the Apollonian preference for rational order, patterns, objectivity and Dionysian for feeling and spontaneous abandon. They’re both tastes.