” Music can’t be imitated. Like Art, Is an Experience—Not Just a Thing”
I love music the way I love art. Deeply, endlessly, reverently. The way some people stare at a painting until it speaks back to them—I listen to music. Really listen. And in both worlds—art and sound—I’ve learned a timeless truth: nothing compares to the original. Not the print, not the photo, not the compressed file that flattens a symphony into a whisper.
Listening to compressed music is like admiring a famous sculpture through a grainy postcard. You can make out the form, the general idea—but the soul? That’s gone. You miss the gentle imperfections of the chisel, the texture of time in the stone. You miss what makes it human. What makes it art.
“Music can’t be imitated, you have to feel it!”
Even the smell of real oil paint in a gallery or the faint scent of aged vinyl when you lift the needle—those sensory details matter. Art, in all its forms, is physical. It has weight. It lives in space. When it’s copied or compressed, it loses its texture, its temperature, its essence. A printed reproduction is like a flat echo—it lacks the breath and heartbeat of the original. Music can’t be imitated.
A real painting is alive. It breathes with the artist’s brushstrokes. The oils crackle with age, whispering stories across canvas like leaves rustling in a gallery of time. You can feel the emotion layered into every stroke, every blend of color. A digital print might get the hues right, but it’s like holding a hologram of the sun—it gives off light, sure, but no warmth.
Likewise, true music—the kind recorded in full fidelity, performed live, or played through equipment that respects the integrity of the sound—is a living thing. It’s the breath between notes, the resonance in a wooden guitar, the sigh of a bow gliding over strings. High-resolution audio or vinyl lets you feel the heartbeat behind the melody. But squashed, compressed files? They’re the plastic fruit in the bowl. Looks right. Tastes like nothing.
Compressed music is like a sculpture made from plastic instead of marble—it can mimic the shape, but it lacks the soul, the gravity, the presence. You don’t feel it the same way. Because art—true art—requires space. Room to resonate, to echo, to be.
Think about it: who ever said, “I’m tired of looking at this beautiful sunset”? No one. But someone flipping through dull photos of sunsets on their phone? That person might swipe right past nature’s greatest show without a second glance. A photo can’t hold the wind on your skin, the glow on your face, the magic in the moment. It’s a visual echo, not the voice.
Music, like art, is an experience—not just a thing. It’s not meant to be background noise or digital wallpaper. It’s meant to stop you in your tracks, to stir something inside you that maybe you didn’t even know was there. The same way a masterpiece can hold a viewer for hours, a well-composed piece of music can speak to a listener without a single word.
The imitators in both fields are everywhere. Stock paintings sold in lobbies. Mass-produced sculptures molded by machines. MP3s that reduce Mozart to a shadow of himself. They serve a purpose—but they’re placeholders. Like empty frames waiting for something real.
True art is timeless. It doesn’t wear out, and we don’t tire of it. It invites us back again and again, and somehow we see or hear something new each time. It’s not just beauty—it’s presence. And that presence only lives in the original.
So let’s stop treating music like a disposable product. Let’s listen with the same reverence we’d give to a gallery masterpiece or a hand-carved statue. Because real music isn’t background noise. Real music can’t be imitated. It’s sculpture in sound. It’s painting in time. It’s art. And it deserves to be heard in full color, not a faded photocopy.
After all, art doesn’t come alive until we respect its form. And music doesn’t sing until we let it breathe.
Curt Hubner : Advanced Integrated Controls
