We hear it whether we want to or not. Music comes out of virtually every structural orifice — doorways, windows, cars, telephones, aeroplanes, computers, lifts, hotels, restaurants and Underground stations trying to keep yobs away. For musicians, this is torture: imagine you're trying mentally to practise your concerto for tomorrow's concert, but someone is trying to deaden your mind with that insufferable recording of popular melodies on the panpipes. If you don't want to hear it, music isn't music: it's just noise. If people have been desensitised to the point that they know timbre but not tone, perhaps it's no wonder.

But what about the way we listen to music we do want to hear? Try this example. We see a high-demand concert on the calendar some way ahead — whether András Schiff at the Wigmore Hall or Madonna at the O2 arena — and we book seats. But we have no idea what will happen that day. The performer can be on tiptop form, but what about the listener? We may have been kept up all night by a crying child, we may have a cold, a train may break down and we arrive seconds before the concert starts, tired, hungry and angry. In our state of stress or exhaustion, a Bach fugue may be an uplifting influence, or it might put us to sleep. Madonna could give us a double shot of energy, or she might irritate the hell out of us and send us scurrying for the exit. That doesn't depend on the performer, it depends on us, the listeners. 

We're constantly being told of the way music impacts upon the brain. What about the other way around? Our subjective responses go far deeper than the mood of the moment. How strongly are we conditioned to a certain response to certain music through experiences in our formative years? For instance, Bach's Goldberg Variations has been my top Desert Island Disc since I first heard it at the age of 16, played on the modern piano by Schiff, who in a Dartington masterclass opened my ears to the glories of the composer. But then at university I encountered a very 1980s attitude which decreed that playing Bach on the piano was virtually a crime against humanity. That struck me as nonsense — and as it happens, Bach advised Cristofori on potential improvements to the pianoforte that the instrument-maker was developing — but you can't tell people that if you're an undergraduate. Today, although I listen with awareness of my own conditioning, I'm still resistant to Bach on the harpsichord since one twang takes me back to 1986.

Yet those promulgating what some now see as early-music fundamentalism in the 1980s were only human. Supposing — just supposing — that in their formative years they had come to associate lavish, romantic performance style with the exaggerated grandiosity that was favoured by the Nazis and for a while continued to characterise a generally Germanic approach to music (notably that of Herbert von Karajan), and thence made a mental connection to a war era that they were desperate to leave behind. This may seem extreme — and it's a hypothetical example — but the subconscious works in bizarre ways, and the sound of music can carry past associations as powerfully as the aroma of Proust's madeleine.

So perhaps the study of how we listen is indeed as important as the study of analysis and performance. Nobody can listen to music without the full compass of their own mind informing and sometimes skewing their response. For every person this is bound to be different. There's nothing we can do about that. Music works at too direct an emotional level. "No Music Day" makes the good point that perhaps, just occasionally, we ought to stop and think about what listening to music really means — and give our overloaded ears a rest.