Any Ravers?

I have noticed there are quite a few house/trance/godforbid...dubstep fans among Head-Fiers. I was wondering if any of you have been raving (i.e. in the underground scene) or at least enjoy a good massive (electric daisy carnival, electric zoo, electric forest....)?
It's certainly a very different way to look at the music and party in a non-judgemental environment. Yeah... I probably won't rave past 25. But it's been a fun ten years. If you can get past the new college freshmen who take too much ecstasy and try to hug everyone they meet it's actually a really interesting environment. I certainly learned to appreciate trance music from raving.

Although I started raving as vinyl was doing down... there was something about being part of a musical revolution that was really appealing. My first rave was at 15 (it was in the UK and my parents were abroad) and I remember that at that particular point electronic music could hardly be found in pop songs at all. As audiophiles we strive to listen to music in the best quality possible. At these things... the sound systems weren't even all that great. It was about enjoying the music through dancing and the accompanying laser shows. Admittedly... the primary reason that so many crackdowns started was because too many ravers relied on MDMA for this musical enjoyment.

Now, on what is perhaps a long aside that many admins will find questionable... I find the comparison between audiophiles and ravers on this substance to be quite illuminating. In order to appease the admins, I will keep my commentary limited to what I (legally, and under the supervision of an Insitutional Review Board)  researched as a behavioral economist two years ago.

Some of my undergraduate research (which I now hope to complete at the graduate level) focused on how individuals value music (for you economists out there... figuring out how to derive utility functions for music appreciation). Working in conjunction with neurologists at a lab that experiments with psycho-pharmaceuticals we were one of the first teams in the country allowed to use MDMA in behavioral experiments (i.e. outside the normal application which is treatment of post traumatic stress disorder). Accordingly, the experiment involved first hooking up electrodes to a sober individual's brain and playing said individuals different types of music. Then, a portion of these subjects (both non-users and regular users) were given MDMA (the rest a placebo) and the experiment was repeated. It turns out that the temporal lobe in the medicated group was stimulated with hundreds of times as much intensity as the sober group. I would have loved to check if that held even if audio quality was deteriorated but I wasn't the principal investigator so I had little say.

Although from a research perspective the experiment didn't actually tell us very much (it turns out that it's horribly difficult to isolate the musical effects of the drug on anything but a fMRI... which is what the professor is using now) what the participants said out loud I found to be highly illuminating. Subjects used the words "clear, crystalline, balanced, warm, and high in treble" to describe the music. These are certainly words you would find in an audiophile's vocabulary. Moreover, when they described how their approach to listening to music changed while utilising the substance, the description sounded very much alike to the analytical listening that audiophiles are accustomed to. Are audiophiles and mdma users similar? In general... not at all. But when it comes to the one thing they DO have in common- an appreciation for music- they might actually be very similar. One researcher suggests that it's possible that in audiophiles a quick release of serotonin upon listening to music the individual finds appealing (or high in quality) mimics the euphoria and serotonin release of ecstasy use. This would mean music IS a drug.  Sadly measuring serum serotonin is quite a P.I.T.A with current technology. I challenge you future bioengineers and neurologists to figure out a way around that.

Perhaps this is why so many ravers are audiophiles...?