Here is how speech and music sound together when given "equal weight" by the brain (to get the full effect of these demonstrations, you should wear stereo headphones):

And here is the same speech and the same music as we would hear them if we wanted to focus on the speaker:

This phenomenon of  "focusing in" on certain aspects of what can be heard and "tuning out" others is known as the "cocktail party effect." Here is what two speakers at a "cocktail party" sound like if we do not distinguish between the two speakers:

Here is what the same "cocktail party conversation" sounds like if we focus on Speaker A:

And here is what the "cocktail party conversation" sounds like if we focus on Speaker B:

Thus, listening involves making creative choices. It also involves "filling in" auditory information that we assume to be present based on past experience. Listen to the following clip:

You just listened to a single phonemic restoration. Here is an example of multiple phonemic restoration:

What is true of phonemes is true of other sounds: 

Neuroscientist Andrew King explains: "Our sensory systems fill in information obscured by other, competing signals to maintain a stable representation of the world" (2007:1).

Finally, our brains "transform" what we hear over time (you do not need to listen to the entire clip): 

And what we hear in one ear affects how we process what we hear in the other ear:

Thus, auditory processing -- listening -- is a creative act.

Einbond's compositions reflect and incorporate what we know about auditory processing. In other words, he composes how we listen -- his compositions embody the way we listen. They "give auditory life to auditory processing" as he puts it, so we hear how we process his composition as we hear the composition itself. Einbond will, for example, record the sounds of rain and convey the details of the way we listen to rain in the composition itself. Einbond notes that every moment of the final composition includes "a recorded sound somewhere in the background," but the entire soundscape is not present throughout the entire composition (Einbond 2012). Da Prato has called this a “cover” of rain (in Einbond 2012). I would argue, however, that Einbond does a cover of the way we perceive the sounds of rain. 

Einbond sees a parallel between the way he created “Passagework” and the way Lloyd created his sonifications. Einbond does a transcription or translation of our perception of a soundscape, which is in turn transcribed or translated by Chavez's brain, and finally sonified (translated) by Lloyd.