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From Understanding Media, chapter 28:

Stereo sound ... is 'all-around' or 'wrap-around' sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point in accordance with the bias of visual culture from its fixed point of view. The hi-fi change-over was really for music what cubism had been for painting, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in depth...

...When l.p. and hi-fi and stereo arrived, a depth approach to musical experience also came in. Everybody lost his inhibitions about 'highbrow', and the serious people lost their qualms about popular music and culture. Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because 'depth' means 'in inter-relation', not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view, and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent upon content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular.

McLuhan is famous for his dictum that "the medium is the message" and this passage is a classic example of his thought. McLuhan draws distinctions between medium and content, and here he draws a picture of the 'medium' of stereo sound. He suggests that the experience of stereo sound itself begets a kind of aural structure, the architecture of which is what truly stirs new consciousness, not the content of the music (actual sounds, tones, rhythms, phrasing, etc.). The distinction, then, is between the banks of the river and the river itself; between the circuitry of home's electrical wiring, and the electricity itself; between the programming of a computer's hard drive and the files a person saves on it. That content itself is less important is demonstrated, as he writes, that now people appreciate both popular and high-art relatively interchangeably. Both make up the river which flows through the multi-faceted irrigation of stereo sound, a higher formal complexity than mono, and which through its programming, offers insight equally, no matter the quality/artisanship of the content delivered.

In my essay Polysemy, I discuss the role of syntax in the overall sign package of artwork, and investigation of the overall syntax of different mediums, and the effects of the differences upon consciousness, is McLuhan's primary area of study. He is truly a master of detecting subtle but profound ramifications of various media, from the wheel to phonetic language to clothing, clocks, photography, the telegraph, typewriter, films, and more. For him, the implications of content in artwork are secondary to the implications of the structure of the media itself. All media are extensions of the human body/mind. Stereo sound (and now, surround sound) is an objective extension of our subjective capacity to hear inclusively from all directions.

Of course content is fundamental to artwork. That goes without saying, McLuhan's own emphases aside. What is notable about content, in whatever form or medium of art, is that its installation and placement in the artwork object is propelled by the artist and his or her intuition. We put things in our art, often, because it just feels right to do so. The same content in the hands of different artists yields different perceptual responses, generally speaking. The same notes of a melody performed by Miles Davis versus John Coltrane yields differences far too notable to dismiss, beyond mere differences of instrument used (trumpet v. sax).

This reality has always meant to me that artists have to strive to feel free to express intuitively, while also taking steps to, in essence, train or inform that intuition through formal study of craft and composition. Follow your bliss, but take ongoing steps to educate it first.