They tested it together. The developer, a skeptic, ran the patch on a sterile lab rig; Matthew fed it shaky field recordings recorded on his phone. When they compared results, both became strange, stubbornly quiet for the same reason: the patch had rewired how they expected to listen. Songs they had loved were suddenly different, not worse but altered, aligned to a new aesthetic built on microdynamics and a reverence for quiet. Listeners either felt honored or betrayed.