Principles of Listening

“For the innocent music lover it must seem strange indeed to read a how-to-book on the subject of listening to music.  Since when are their problems in listening to music?”

-William Schuman’s introduction to the book “What to Listen for in Music” by Aaron Copland

It is easy to take listening to music for granted.  I don’t want to make it sound like I’m putting music up on a pedestal.  On the contrary, I feel people intuitively know more about music than they think…they just lack the descriptors to explain what they are hearing.  Having said this, listening to music is a skill that takes practice.  I have learned many things over the years, and I am still learning new things every day.  In the same way you lift weights at the gym, Charles Ives likened listening to “bulking up” your ear muscles.  I can only hope my ears continue to grow stronger.

1.      Judgment


Here are my two favorite quotes about being judgmental when it comes to music:


“You don’t know what you like.  You like only what you know.”  -Unknown


“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”  -John Cage

2.      Windows

There is a theory called the “dual iceberg theory” that is used to explain how bilingual people perceive language.  The gist is that apart from the surface dissimilarities, languages often share a lot of common ground.  For instance, the way to ask “What time is it?” is different in French (“Quelle heur est-il?”) than it is in English.  When I learned French in 10^th grade, I didn’t have to RE-LEARN how to tell time though.  I already knew the underlying concept of time; it is just the syntax of the language that shifts.  Music is the same way.

You need a gateway into a new kind of music; something to take you from the surface into deeper understanding.  You have to find the bridge that links what you already like to something foreign and unfamiliar.  I call this a “window”.  These “windows” are the vital first step towards musical understanding.

Here is an example.  I never thought I would have a fleeting interest in bluegrass music.  Listening to Punch Brothers changed this.  Although their bluegrass instrumentation set them apart from anything else I listened to (surface dissimilarity), their exceptional song writing and compositional techniques perked my interest.  These are common qualities shared across many kinds of music that I enjoy (classical, jazz, progressive rock).  Thus, they inadvertently pulled me into the world of bluegrass.

3.      Homogenous Sound

If you are not well versed with a genre of music, your ears will not be very sensitive yet.  It might sound like a big gray blob of sound to you.  For example, classical music requires you to listen with a different set of ears than you would for pop music. 

For one, classical music has much less of a timbral pallet than pop music.  This is because the sounds you can make with acoustic instruments are a lot more finite than the nearly limitless sounds of electronic instruments.  You can pick out the style of a pop song by listening to it for ½ a second (try it the next time you are flipping through radio stations).  Classical music takes a little bit longer.  I think the difference between something like Romantic and Baroque music is more defined by things like themes, motives, and formal structure rather than timbre. 

So if you listen to a lot of pop music, your ears are probably not as sensitive to the more subtle changes in sound because you are used to wide shifts in timbre.  That’s why you hear a lot of “Classical music is boring.  It all sounds the same to me”.  It’s not your fault; you just have ears born in the 21^st century.  You need to become more sensitive to a kind of music that was not written in the same culture, society, and era as you.  Your development of this sensitivity is a process that occurs slowly over time.

4.      Clicking

It might take a long time for something to click with you.  Sure this seems obvious, but it’s easy for us human beings to forget to be patient.  You can’t listen to something once and expect to always like it.  You might have to revisit a song, an album, or a style of music countless times before something strikes you.  I hated hip-hop as a kid (what do you expect from a white kid growing up in suburbia).  It took me a solid 2 years of listening to hip-hop music on and off to finally GET IT.  I’m not kidding.  I would force myself to listen to hip-hop music (I wanted to be cool in college and ‘branch out’), but for the longest time it would never be something I would have a legitimate craving to listen to.  Digging in to Kanye West’s music made me understand the importance (and effectiveness) of sampling, while listening to Jurassic 5 helped me understand how different rappers use different kinds of “flow”.  After 2 years in the making, these two “windows” helped crystallize everything for me.

5.      Revisiting

I have listened to some albums for weeks or even months straight.  I would dissect every detail and be attune to every single little nuance in the music…or so I thought.  Sometimes you put away an album for a few months, listen to it again, and hear something you have never heard before.  I think it only makes sense: We are constantly growing as people.  The experiences in our lives mash new perspectives onto old ones, causing a shift in the filters we use to perceive our world.  Thus, our outlook on music changes.

Also, I find that listening to a wider variety of things increases my ability to hear music more sensitively.  You would think that listening to more rock music would help you understand rock music more, but sometimes the exact opposite is true.  Diverse listening habits prevent your ears from getting too entrenched in one kind of sound.

6.      Connection Over Time

Songs connect with me at very particular times in my life.  What will give me the chills right now might not phase me a year or even a month from now.  Even those timeless songs don’t have the same punch they had in those particular moments of my past.  This is why music is like a drug: you are constantly trying to get your next fix! 

On another note, it is fun to be surprised.  I will think that I have a strong connection with a song, only to develop an even greater obsession one year later.  Weird how that works.

7.      Prior Exposure Influences Preference

I mentioned above I hated hip-hop when I was growing up.  What I did love was playing the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games.  A lot of the music featured in the game was hip-hop music.  Since you were forced to listen to the music (and I kind of tuned it out since I was focused on the gaming aspect anyways), it slipped into my subconscious.  Years later when I tried to get into A Tribe Called Quest and Jurassic 5 for the first time, I recognized some songs from the game.  I still didn’t like hip-hop, but I at least tolerated those few songs I knew.  I clung to familiarity.  Things grew from there.  I believe that having that early exposure was crucial to worming my way into hip-hop music.  Prior exposure influences preference.

8.      Value


I think David Byrne sums it up the best:

“There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine”


No style or genre of music is inherently bad.  They all have different functions.  If you think a style is intrinsically bad, you are analyzing the music through the wrong lens.  People slam mainstream pop music to the wall, but don’t you think there is something to be said about writing a simple, effective song with universal appeal?  Sorry, but that is incredibly hard to do.  Rap music also gets a bad connotation, but it is incredibly complex in terms of its rhythm, rhyme structure, and usage of pitch (yes…rappers actually use pitch when they rap).  I didn’t understand screamo music until I re-imagined the role of the lead singer (or screamer?) in a screamo group.  My friend explained to me: “Don’t think of the singer as a singer.  Think of them as a percussionist…their screams accent the music like loud hits on a crash cymbal”. 

9.      There are more similarities across genres than within genres.


Thanks to Eric for this quote from bluegrass musician Chris Thile:


“You'll find much more in common with great bluegrass and great heavy metal than you will with great bluegrass and bad bluegrass”

10.  Information Overload

We basically have instantaneous access to all the music in the world right now.  I can find most of what I’m looking for on Spotify.  If I can’t, I can torrent it in 10 minutes (shhhhhh).  With this sort of accessibility comes a question of crippling proportions: how do you listen to all this music?  How do you balance depth with breadth?  Beyond just music, I think this will be one of the defining existential questions of the digital age. 

I have yet to find the best means to cope with this.  My best answer right now is that I go with my gut.  I used to arbitrarily tell myself, “Ok this week I will devote to listening to this album.  Then the next week I will devote to branching out and listening to as much stuff as possible”.  This never seemed to work for me.  Now if my gut tells me to listen to this album for the next month, I will.  If it tells me to listen to a new song in a new style every 2 seconds, I will.  Basically I try not to think so hard, which is really frikkin hard for me to do.