In today’s Guardian I was reading about the Japanese tradition of ‘listening bars’, where customers have ‘a deep, beautiful, reverential attitude to listening to music’. High-end sound systems, sometimes dominating a whole wall, convey every layer of a recorded album through ‘beautifully designed speakers’, allowing people to ‘re-engage with music in an era where the listening experience – and all the love and care that goes into recording, writing, mixing, mastering an album – has been devalued’.

Of course I can understand that people enjoy being able to hear every detail of a favourite album in the highest quality. Amazing things can be done in the recording studio, and these things deserve to be heard. As Brian Eno said in a radio interview the other day (I can’t quote him exactly but it was something like this …), ‘The recording studio is the great musical instrument of the 20th and 21st century, just as the orchestra was the great instrument of the 19th century.’ But somehow the idea of people sitting in reverential silence listening to a machine relaying something that was recorded months or years ago makes me feel uneasy.

We in the live music world are longing for people to come and sit in deep, beautiful silence listening to us perform. We all know that audiences have been taken away from the concert hall by a number of factors, recorded music being one of them. Now it seems that recorded music has acquired alpha status, with home hi-fi systems evolving quickly to transmit it. The ‘performance’ is by the sound system, not by actual live musicians.

I think of all the classical musicians I know who practise and practise in the hope of people coming to hear them in concert and paying close attention to everything they’re doing. I imagine musicians on stage in a concert hall, hoping that tonight there will be people in the audience who notice and understand. And then I think of the devoted customers in listening bars, heads bent forward, listening in rapt silence to a wall of designer speakers.

If only I could wave a magic wand and put the talented listeners together with the talented players!