5: Active Listening

Thinking about all the music that’s passed through your life in the last few days, did you just hear it? Or were you actively listening to it?

When musicians think about developing their brain and ear for music they often make the mistake of jumping straight to music theory and ear training, thinking that what they need is all about specific concrete skills like recognising intervals, understanding the rules of harmony, or learning to adjust EQ bands on a mixer by ear.

But there’s one big-picture skill that’s possibly more important than all of those, as well as providing a great opportunity to put those other skills to use: Active Listening.

Active Listening simply means your mind is truly engaged in the activity of listening.

This is closely related to the idea of “music appreciation”. If you take a traditional class on music appreciation it helps you start learning this skill of Active Listening, and equips you with some key concepts to put into action as you do it. But it only scratches the surface, and few musicians have actually studied even that basic form of Active Listening.

As a result, many of us wander in music for years, not realising just how much we’re constantly missing out on in the music we hear and play.

Through intentionally cultivating our Active Listening skills, we can become more aware of all the rich detail in music, as well as understanding more about how it all fits together, and why.

If you’ve ever been frustrated, knowing that there’s much more going on in the music you love than you seem to be able to pin down or explain—or if you’ve felt overwhelmed or intimidated hearing other people describe music with a level of vocabulary, conceptual understanding, and detail that just seems way beyond what you could manage yourself—then you’re going to love this chapter.

Overview

In this chapter we’ll begin by looking at the benefits of Active Listening, and all the ways it can permeate and enhance your musical life.

We’ll explain how Active Listening works, and introduce the one core technique we recommend for practicing Active Listening: to listen “with a question in mind.”

As Tony Robbins says, “The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking,” and so we’ll provide guidance on the types of question we want to be asking, as well as providing lists of example questions you can use, throughout the chapter.

Next we’ll introduce the 4-Dimensional Active Listening framework, which lets you deconstruct any music you hear or imagine in a methodical and flexible way. We’ll go one-by-one through the four Dimensions: Timbre, Pitch, Rhythm and Dynamics, covering the basic concepts, terminology and theory of each, as well as how to start listening for them.

The music we hear and play exists in the real world, whether live or in a recording. It’s therefore illuminating to explore what we can consider a fifth Dimension: the audio side of music, including Audio Frequencies and Audio Effects.

Finally we’ll look at the bigger picture of how music is arranged in time, through Form and Texture, and how to listen for each.

We’ll round off the chapter with a 7-Day Practice Plan which you can use to start putting Active Listening into action, using any music you choose.

Benefits of Active Listening

Active Listening will add immensely to your own enjoyment of music, and your ability to share that enjoyment with others, not to mention doing wonders for your own musicality. Let’s explore some of the specific benefits you can expect when you learn this exciting skill.

Active Listening increases your musical understanding

When you listen actively, you begin to understand how different parts of the music fit together, how different sounds and instruments combine together, how a piece of music is organised into verses, choruses, and different musical sections. You can listen to pieces of music from different genres and eras, recognising all the different elements and how they come together. Naturally this is invaluable in creating and expressing your own music too.

Music critics will often make remarks like “It sounds like a cross between The Beatles and Nirvana, with just a touch of ’80s synth pop, sprinkled with a few droplets of ‘Yes’.”

It can sound impressive, and clearly they are hearing music in a deeper, richer way than the average person on the street. But unless you want to write reviews yourself, when it comes to sitting down with your instrument and actually playing the music you want to play, what does all that talk of “It sounds a little like this, a little like that, somewhat like this… “ get you?

Does it tell you what notes or chords to play and how to play them? How to organise them into a cohesive, whole piece of music? How to make it sound more like this and less like that?

Sadly not. So how do you gain that ability, to translate from these loose wordy descriptions into clear, precise, practical implications? Active Listening is the answer.

Active Listening “wakes up” your ears

Everything you’re learning in music—Head, Hands, Hearing and Heart—all of the related skills can be applied to, and will benefit from, Active Listening.

With Active Listening, every time you hear a song, you have an opportunity to both put your musical skills to use and also improve those skills.

Whenever Musical U members are looking for more time for music practice amid a busy life, Active Listening is high on our list of recommendations—because there aren’t many of us who don’t have opportunities during the day for at least listening to music.

You might be walking the dog, washing the dishes, driving a commute—all those times when music is normally just in the background can become valuable opportunities to level up your musicality through Active Listening.

Active Listening and Musical Memory

When you listen actively, you are also training your musical memory. To be able to mentally analyse what you heard, in the way that Active Listening involves, your musical mind needs to hold it in place for a moment. It starts forming a mental model of what’s going on, and that kind of modelling and mental structure is exactly what you need to more easily remember longer sections of music you hear and play.

Active Listening and Audiation

As you’re probably realising if you read Chapter 3: Audiation, Active Listening is closely connected to the skill of Audiation. When you practice Active Listening, you’re teaching your brain to conjure up vivid mental representations of music, and that’s something you can then apply to music you’re creating in your mind yourself as well as the music you’ve heard.

In the chapter on Audiation, we shared one powerful exercise for combining your practice of both skills: after practicing Active Listening (like you’ll learn about in this chapter), pause the recording or just take a moment after it ends, and try to recreate the song in your mind in as much detail as possible. This simple practice will develop your Active Listening, your Audiation, and your musical memory all at once.

The more you’ve explored a song or piece in detail with Active Listening, the easier you’re going to find it to remember, and reconstruct it in rich, accurate detail in your mind.

The Gift of Active Listening

If you can say exactly what is going on in a piece of music, if you can talk precisely about the bassline, about the drum part, the guitar part, the rhythm, the different sections, the content of the lyrics, and so on, then you’re going to be far more able to grab your own instrument or voice to make your own great music happen.

Now you’re thinking, talking, and behaving like a musician.

Active Listening is a wonderful practice. It’s a “gift that keeps on giving” for your whole life, as you learn to have deeper enjoyment of all the music you hear and bring a deeper knowledge and understanding of music to your own musical expression, whatever form that takes.