Something unexpected happened to me during lockdown: I gained deeper appreciation for my ears. I don’t mean aesthetically, (though I’ve got no problem in that department, believe me), but rather functionally. As the coronavirus put much of the world off limits, and my household became suddenly crowded and chaotic, I increasingly began to think of audio as a kind of refuge.

Glass screens had been conquered by Slack and Zoom and social media, the apps of work and school and life’s assorted horribles, but my ears offered daily escape from, as Freddie Mercury sang, all this visual. Audio’s new power lay in its emotional intensity and its digital malleability. It is the sensory domain that technology has conquered most completely, and depending on how I tweaked it, my aural environment could alter my mood and physiology, could inspire joy and soften sadness, and perhaps help prompt new ideas and deeper thinking.

To say all this quite a bit less romantically: My kids were home and I spent a lot of time with headphones on — noise-canceling ones.

I mean, a lot. The other day I realized that I’ve taken to popping my AirPods Pro in just after I wake up, sometimes at the same time I put in my contact lenses. From there my ears are usually occupado all day, often until I sleep, sometimes even during.

About half the time my headphones are a fire hose for media — podcasts, audiobooks and such, often played at close to double-speed, because I can’t resist information saturation. During the rest of the day I cultivate a bespoke, moody soundtrack to accompany ordinary life: music to work and cook and walk and exercise by; refreshing, digitally enhanced silence for thinking in a house with two loud, pandemic-bored kids; and many long hours of bells, nature sounds, precise-frequency tones and other strange background noises for relaxation and sleep.

If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?

But I grew up in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, back when audio was hampered by physical scarcity and fierce gatekeeping. Kids, when I was a teenager, a new album, let’s say a dozen songs, usually sold for between $15 and $20, at least a month’s allowance. If you liked a song — even just one — from a new release, you were all but forced to buy the whole album. (You could buy CD and cassette singles, too, but they were hard to find and, often at $5 or more for just two or three songs, kind of a sucker’s game.)

I am also old enough to remember the long road to today’s musical cornucopia. The recording industry spent the early part of this century fighting against the digital world rather than trying to adapt to it; it was not until the 2010s that all-you-can-play subscription services like Spotify gained clearances to operate in the United States. Perhaps because I followed those battles closely as a reporter, the endless digital buffet available to our ears today still feels like an everyday miracle. The ability to call up just about any song at any time, to wander musical landscapes through genres and across decades and then to burrow deep wherever you like — none of this was ever inevitable.

Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).

But digital audio has done more than alter how music is paid for. Along with two other innovations — smartphones and wireless headphones — technology has also expanded the frontiers of audio. By allowing access to more sounds in more places during more of our days, it has broadened what music is for and deepened the role audio plays in our lives.

For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I have always been a lover of pop music, but in high school and college, I was a serial rabbit holer — I’d get hooked on an artist (Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Ani DiFranco) and then spend months obsessing over that artist’s work, listening more or less constantly to the same tunes over and over. A lot of this was by necessity: Even if you were a Mr. Moneybags who owned dozens of CDs, only a small amount of music was accessible at any moment. The beloved, beat-up Discman that got me through college could hold only a single CD of music; I played “OK Computer” every day for a semester mostly because I couldn’t get enough Radiohead, but a little because I kept forgetting to switch out the disc.

I still fall into rabbit holes (I spent about two months last year listening to one album on repeat, Jenny Lewis’s “On The Line”), but in the streaming era my tastes have grown far more capacious. Streaming has turned me into a musical butterfly, flitting between moods and genres in whatever way my tastes happen to lean. Indeed, in the last half decade I have explored more kinds of music than in the decades before — and I keep finding more stuff I like, because thanks to endless choice, there’s never nothing to listen to.

For instance, I turned 40 a few years ago and became, as required, a Dylanologist — one of those insufferable types who regales bored friends and family with factoids about bootlegs and alternative lyrics in certain legendary Dylan recording sessions. In years past, pursuing such an interest would have been a time-consuming side hustle; now I can pull up much of Bob Dylan’s catalog, bootlegs and all, on any road trip just as easily as I can play the latest hits, as my very annoyed children never tire of complaining.

Or: I used to know next to nothing about hip-hop; thanks to Spotify, I can walk you through much of it, and my wife and I may have been the middle-aged fans you noticed at a Migos concert I dragged her to in 2017.

Or: I’m ethnically Indian but I’d long known little about Bollywood. Then Spotify recommended a song by Shreya Ghoshal, a queen of Indian cinema “playback singing,” and my 8-year-old daughter and I became devoted to pop from the subcontinent.

I am not alone in experiencing a musical reawakening through digital music. In a note to investors last summer, Spotify said that its service was pushing wider diversification in tastes. The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.

But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself. The canonical recent example: “Old Town Road,” the 2019 Lil Nas X country-rap song that first went viral on Tik-Tok, then took over the whole world, becoming the longest-running No. 1 single in the history of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (19 weeks). “Is it even possible, in 2021, to locate, let alone enforce, an impermeable membrane between R&B and hip-hop, hip-hop and pop?” the critic Amanda Petrusich asked recently in The New Yorker. “Genre was once a practical tool for organizing record shops and programming radio stations, but it seems unlikely to remain one in an era in which all music feels like a hybrid, and listeners are no longer encouraged (or incentivized) to choose a single area of interest.”

Many artists remain deeply skeptical of the music business’s turn to streaming. While big acts can pull through on the internet’s infinite jukebox, smaller groups make a pittance from streaming and must support themselves by selling merchandise, touring and other business opportunities. Still, these issues seem fixable — contracts will likely adjust to artists’ needs over time, and new streams of revenue, like direct support from audiences, will likely catch on.

What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.

Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.