It is 1973.

You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.

You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.

You lift up the cover of your turntable.

Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.

You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.

There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.

A pause.

And then the music begins.

Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.

When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?

----

It is 2025.

You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.

You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.

You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.

You hit 'play'.

Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.

And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.

At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?

You typed a really long comment, but you're not talking about the same thing. Listening to an ad before a song starts is very obviously not part of the music, even if it's part of "the experience of listening to music (on a streaming service)." The ad before a song plays is not included in the song's official runtime.

You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).

Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"