Listening without interpretation...is it impossible?

If your read and understand my post you will see that you are right about "representation" theory of perception but he is right too in his own way about the way the mind conditioned by language and historical personal and collective history filter our inattentive habit of perception...

Then you are right all together but from different perspective...

Understanding each other first is more important than to be right at the end , in most ordinary non critical situation of everyday life...😁😊

.@berner99 I cannot help you and will not try..

Gestalt psychology is only a fragment of the Goethean method who anticipate it completely...

I doubt reading your sarcastic posts about me for the last 7 years, without ever any arguments, i doubt that your amount of good will is enough to understand anything... Certainly you miss Geoffkait who you mocked in the same TROLLiNG way for all the years i was here with you childesque "tin foil hat" insult reflex....I must be your new scapegoat obsession...Old age create habit... And your sarcastic habit reflect the beginning of a health problem perhaps : how old are you?

Acting like a children or a troll make it difficult for me to guess it...

The only excuse i can give you is that this last post is only an inoffensive sarcasm, and my strong reaction come from the annoying habit you have to troll my posts...

 I apologize but forget me and look for an another windmill...

Anyway if you want to understand the relation of part and whole in a living perceptive experience try this:

http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php

But the book is too big for alzheimer sufferer who use sarcasm against other all the time or for very old man ensconced in their own "opinion"....

More on the Gestalt principles of perception, please.

I would  wish i was not so late to wish you the best for this year...

I was, and i apologize with my deepest respect and thoughts...

«I dont use my urinary tract when i spoke about philosophy»- Groucho Marx🤓

Oh, great.

Which restroom will they be using?

You were perfectly right to criticize the superficial notion of "representation"...

It is already in Schopenhauer reading Goethe and the Veda, thinking about the dead road of Kantism and Cartesianism...

But the representation theory so wrong when it want to explain perception, come from an history and from the evolution of consciousness with language...This must be explained but not here for sure...

Your Darwinian direct "participation" cannot explain perception either...

The truth is more complex....

There is no interface between us and the world you are right, but the "world" itself appear like an interface between "us" and us...Man is double, from evolution come history and these 2 are the 2 faces of man...History is cultures and civilizations, it is  is a "symbolic form" related to the history of consciousness...

It is not the world which is divided in two...

It is us who are double: an animal body and his embryonnic ego and a spirit.....

The world is not double but it cannot be perceived in his "wholeness" without a yoga of the consciousness  lived THROUGH our own body  which is explained by Husserl but way better by the Goethean phenomenology...You can try Aurobindo if you are more interested in oriental attitude...

Perceiving anything in his true nature ask for a discipline of the mind and of the attention, alien to the common man prisonner of his habit and living in a "virtual" world...

There is no interface between us and the world , the interface is between our sleepwalking ego and our spirit and soul.... The interface is our own body between my ego  and my soul....We must learn to inhabit our own body....We must learn to hear and see...

The history of philosophy is founded on the history of language and on the history of consciousness itself ...

The representation theory of perception is not even wrong, it is an half truth born from history.....

The Darwinian theory of evolution is not even wrong, it is an half truth born also from history....

The whole truth ask for the experience of oneness....This experience is the real basis to the participation in the cosmos and in the natural world at the animal level... In human this experience ask for a reappropriation of our animal nature instead of his negation and at the same time a spiritual transcendental experience of the "one"....All that in our own body/soul or External/Internal...

Like said Swedenborg very economically, Swedenborg stuttered al his life and learned to speak with very few words, speaking about death:

« In death the internal become the external and vice versa»

Then trhe relation between my body and the cosmos is a double in- flowing and out-flowing, like in respiration...It is a dynamic polarization which has been transformed in a static  duality by habit and conditioning... 

This is where we part company. I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy and it has a fatal flaw -- namely, that there is some way we could step outside of ourselves to view, simultaneously, both the "reality" and the "perception" in order to determine if the representation is correct. Cannot be done.

Rather than mind as "representer" of reality, think Darwin; think, adaptive organ for getting along in a wider environment. Think of perceiving-thinking as nodes in an ongoing and transactional sequence. Perceiving is like breathing. In other words, our perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions involving eyes, ears, brains, and eventually language. There is no interface between "us" and the "world." We are the world interacting with the world.

For sure between a necessary interpretative engagement in music listening, and a relax listening, and all the possible variations making us able to reach complete detachment and "no interpretation" at all of what we are listening to, exist many intermediary scales and attitudes and many hearing gestures......

But in general to begin with we must "interpret" if we want to choose what we want to listen to... And a baby learn to listen by exposure to some cultural musical attitudes to which he will relate to all his life...I remember how i listened to singing very young...

Only a yogi can listen beyond any relax attitude and interpretation, pure sound and pure silence, without even separating the 2....

For the "words" vocabulary conditioning problem:

The situation in audio, is most of the times a negative conditioning situation, because the "words" associated to sound most of the time HIDE the acoustic meaning and the musical meaning and experience.... It is more a consumer programmation or conditioning by the market pressure to sell tube and S.S. amplifiers for example, and to gather people around their specific attributed and alleged superior sonic qualities...Same goes for dac or speakers types...

But we cannot focus on acoustic and music by focusing on amplifier, dac and speakers difference only...

On the contrary, when the audio system is chosen, then we listen to the acoustical rendering of the music in a specific room....The audio system must disapear and with it all the vocabulary linked to it: warm, cold, neutral, accurate,colored...How is it possible? By acoustic and psycho-acoustic treatment and control specifically adapted for the chosen gear and making all musical sound natural and approximating a lived event...

The micro structure "volume" of a tonal timbre playing gesture by a musician in the larger "volume" of our room, is never understandable or graspable, in solely and merely with words like "warm", "cold" , "neutral" , "accurate" or "colored" qualities so much than by musically and acoustically meaningful vocabulary linked to acoustic experiments and musical experience first ...

We cannot interpret music experience with the engineering description of an amplifier sound first and last....

It is the reason why people comparing and reviewing gear never adress the basic method by which we can optimally embed the gear in their mechanical, electrical and acoustical working dimensions... They sell a ready made material product supposed to be PERFECT not a way and a method to install it the right way...

The sound of a piano in an acoustically controlled room, is not, warm, cold, accurate, neutral....His timbre qualities are way too much detailed and complex to be reduced to this vocabulary....Same thing is true about an orchestra and the acoustic description of his manifestation in a room...

If someone meditate and can forget when listening all his history and biases by definition, he did not listen to MUSIC anymore but to Sound frequencies or to silence...

This way of listening is very therapeutic, the more we put ourself into it...

But it is no more culturally and individually performed music which we listen to , it is communion with sound as an uncreated force...

In that silence and sound change their role, suddenly sound ressemble to silence and silence contain sound....

AUM is no more sound or silence but both...

Listening without interpretation is the definition of journalism...and also meditation.

Can you let go of your beliefs? or disbeliefs? and just listen?

That is up to the individual doing the listening, some can.... many can’t.

The vocabulary and sound experiences used and suggested by audio engineering mass market in audio magazines is NOT the vocabulary and experience used and suggested by acoustic and by psycho-acoustic sciences...

And the vocabulary and experience of music is NOT the vocabulary and experience of the others two...

Learning how to use and experience and DISTINGUISH the reality suggested by these words and concepts in these THREE different perspectives is very important...

But contrary to the vocabulary in acoustic and psycho-acoustic experiences the vocabulary used and suggested by electronical design mass marketing HIDE the musical experience behind the sound experience and for the sake of the sound experience of the particular piece of gear...

Acoustic reveal music, the focus on the gear obsession hide it...

For the OP. citation i think it is an interesting one because NO ONE can listen music tabula rasa... We all come from experiences and past history which act like a sieve and a filter... Positively and also negatively....there is a balance which is related to each one personal musical evolution history and  cultural and spiritual knowledge here...

For example it is impossible for someone NEVER exposed to the history of the symphony in European music to catch the meaning of the 5th Bruckner symphony finale...

But when i was 14 years old i immediately loved Bach at first listening but with the help of a short musical education in a music course.... None other composers ever attracted really my attention at these times .... Then there is also a past history in us not coming from this life only perhaps and there is in us an innate taste unbeknown to us waiting to be awaken...

But music is like mathematics and the scale of each meaning levels cannot be PERCEIVED and LOVED and UNDERSTOOD without a loose or a minimal formal education of ourselves by ourselves or by others and with time and listening experiences...

Even crocodile are not tabula rasa anyway but we cannot change easily their basic taste....But it is possible with a baby crocodile with a part of him relatively a tabula rasa.... I have seen a South-american man educating a crocodile young to be his pet.... Perhaps he can teach him "love" manifested at his most basic level....Anyway....

«We can educate even crocodile with time»-Anonymus Smith reading Darwin and the Bible...

«Do you suggest here that we can educate audiophiles or the rap music lovers?»-Groucho Marx 🤓

«It will not be politically correct to say so brother»-Harpo Marx