It could be that you don't listen to music while reading. You might find background sound distracting, especially if it's hard to ignore. In case you prefer music while listening, the chances are that you use it to block distractions. Dan Willingham had an interesting observation that soothing sounds can also ease anxiety, explaining why some people prefer it to silence when studying.
But what if music or soundscape could enhance understanding of a text or trigger complementary thoughts?
The question does have some merit - "touching" music can positively impact memory encoding. Researchers had seen the opposite effects of "joyful" music and white noise (rain). Also, tonal languages teach us that you can encode grammatical meaning in voice pitch. However, the latter seems to be a learned, not a universal feature.
The other reason I'm interested in the double encoding (sound and text) is the impression that text alone does not seem to be sufficient in all cases.
Life sciences have a long history of abstracting complex processes into easy to talk about definitions.
Below is Francis Crick's note, one of the people awarded with the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA structure, explaining the so-called "central dogma" in biology. This graph is reproduced almost the same way in the current biology textbooks.
The reality is that the processes that link these entities, that we intuitively name "transcription" or "translation," are not exactly well understood and certainly not so straightforward as depicted by Crick. A more accurate version from 2011 is shown below.
Is it problematic? Well, it is - if you think that you know what "translation" "is", you're unlikely to study it in depth. You are likely to skim over it. You are likely to fall prey to cognitive biases.
You aren't likely to discover something new about it.
My definition of "hyperhuman" I wrote some time ago concludes with:
Hyperhuman uses peak performance to discover the unmediated reality and become free in the capacity to think for himself/herself. It's about understanding that perception is malleable, and so many things around are just unmaintained software programs.
Can we better understand the world if the information is encoded in complementary ways? I will find out along the way. With you. Expect some future newsletters to have attached audio - let's see if that will add anything to the text.