No one remembers, word for word, all that was said in any lecture, or playing in amy piece. But if you understood it once, you now own new networks of knowledge, about each theme, and how it changes and relates to others. Thus, no one could remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony entire, from a single hearing. But neither could one ever hear again those first four notes as just four notes! Once but a tiny scrap of sound, it is now a Known Thing- a locus in the web of all other things we know whose meanings and significances depend on each other.

(Marvin Minksy. Music, mind and meaning. In Music, Mind and Brain, as quoted by Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain. Emphasis mine)