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In the summer of 1969, when I was eleven, I bought a stereo system at the local hi-fi shop.  It cost all of the hundred dollars I had earned weeding neighbors' gardens that spring at seventy-five cents an hour.  I spent long afternoons in my room, listening to records:  Cream, the Rolling Stones, Chicago, Simon and Garfunkel, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, George Shearing, and the saxophonist Boots Randolph.  I didn't listed particularly loud, at least not compared to my college days when I actually set my loudspeakers on fire by cranking up the volume too high, but the noise evidently was too much for my parents.  My mother was a novelist;  she wrote every day in the den just down the hall and played the piano for an hour every night before dinner.  My father was a businessman;  he worked eighty-hour weeks, forty of those hours in his office at home on evenings and weekends.  Being the businessman that he was, my father made me a proposition:  He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home.  Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music.

-Daniel J. Levitin,  This Is Your Brain On Music:  The Science Of A Human Obsession