For anybody suffering from problems related to sleep or having a hard time relaxing, nature sounds may be able to help. I got the feeling that in my cultural history, at some point man was overwhelmed by the vast magic and quick karma of the world and decided not to serve it, but to control it. In this way, we would not have to bow to the forces of nature or eventually even take note of them, so long as we could keep them at bay, insulated by highly refined materials from around the colonized world.

Though he said it in an alluring manner and with the symbolic gesture of refusing food to play music until everyone else had eaten, the phrase, Music is my food” is literal, for the quality of his music is reflected in the quality and quantity of his food.

The reward of good music is obvious, but another benefit of such practice is that one’s world gets more musical; the simultaneous and successive sounds on the street, in the house, in other people’s voices, and eventually all those things that vibrate are heard and understood as notes; patterns and relations of things start to make sense in musical terms, and in general – as with philosophy – music becomes something that one lives, not just studies.

Whilst a single individual, removed from social influences, might choose to listen to Artist A, the same person in real life is going to be introduced to artists through their friends, either locally or online, and will instead end up listening to Artists C and K, who may be of a similar (or even inferior) quality but that isn’t the real point.

This is decisive if true, but there is plenty of room to quibble about our ability to test for the right kinds of imaginative activity, the selection of the subjects, and so on. A different kind of objection is that if the persona theory were true, expressive music could not constrain our imaginative activity in such a way as to yield convergent judgments of expressiveness among understanding listeners.