With the usual reservations that apply to this kind of idea, here are two more kinds of people. It's really just the old form / content thing, but perhaps from a slightly different angle. One kind listens to music structure-first. What key is this? Where's the second subject? etc. etc.. Listeners of this type can't grasp a piece of music or cope with emotional content or "meaning" until they've classified it in terms of a pre-existing catalogue of structures and forms, periods, nationalities, styles, etc.. Often, these listeners have had a formal musical training, but that's not a necessity. There are analogues in the jazz and pop / rock worlds, sometimes among people with little musical background. The second kind listen content-first. If a piece of music "speaks" to them, they may start thinking about how it works and analysing the underlying structures. If not, they're unlikely to pay much attention to the building-blocks. They don't care if a piece fits into some category or not. If it works and there isn't a category to fit, then we need a new one. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't matter. My wife, who has an academic musical background and who is finding her way into all my posts this week, is 90% of the first type when listening to music at concerts, on the radio or recordings. When working as a music therapist, I think she is more in the second mode. I'm definitely the second type, believing that the response is foremost and interest in how it's achieved comes afterwards - although I can to some extent function in the other mode if I deliberately push myself into it. Occasionally I get sufficiently interested in a composer I don't much care for to study him analytically in the hope that doing so will open up a new way of responding to his music. That happened last year with me and Harrison Birtwistle - with the result that although I now understand him rather better and I can listen to some of his music with something almost approaching pleasure, I still don't care for him very much. I developed an argument a few days ago that "assimilating" music is a complex process requiring perception and some analysis of structural components and patterns - and that suggests that, at a low level, we all absorb and process music in the same way. I'm now thinking about a much higher-level process, and it was musing about how I react to Messiaen that set this train of though going. Maybe this points towards a resolution of some of these never-ending arguments - at a low level we all respond to sounds, patterned sounds and music similarly, because doing so uses pre-programmed neural functions that are common to everyone with normally functioning ears and brain. But as incoming sound-patterns get "chunked" together and processed in higher levels in ways more determined by our different experiences, education, training etc., so the patterns of our responses are more likely to diverge into very different paths. It may be no co-incidence that, while I'm thinking about this idea of "layered" responses to music, I'm also grappling with making the leap from "monolithic" Windows to the more cleanly structured and layered world of Linux. A curious parallel there. Ian Crisp [log in to unmask]