How Active Listening Works

At this point you’re probably wondering: “Alright, but what exactly are you doing when you’re ‘practicing active listening’?”

Active Listening is not a new invention. As noted above, the idea of music appreciation or “critical listening” has been around for a long time.

For example when I was younger, I took a number of “music appreciation” classes. We would listen to a track and then discuss it, with the teacher generally providing most of the “right answers”. Honestly, I loved it, because it was like a series of musical adventures, exploring music I never would normally have listened to. And I certainly did pick up some musical knowledge along the way.

More than anything else though, it just made me aware of how much I didn’t know! I could tell you all about the tracks we had covered in class, but barely felt any more able to describe or understand other music I heard or played.

As we built Musical U, we found that most material on this topic follows a similar approach. It provides lots of descriptions of music, and expects the student to somehow turn that into the ability to produce those kinds of descriptions themselves. This can serve to wake up your ears a bit, but nobody seemed to be really teaching a method for doing it yourself.

That’s why we developed our 4-Dimensional Active Listening framework, which all centers around a single, simple method for practicing active listening.

Listening With A Question In Mind

One way to think about Active Listening is that you’re thinking while listening. You are not just letting your thoughts wander, or being distracted by some other activity. You are focusing your full attention on the music you’re hearing.

Easier said than done!

We’ve found that the easiest and best way to do this is by using a question to focus your mind.

Instead of just trying to generally “pay attention to the music”, you ask yourself one or more specific questions about the music, and then use your ears to try to answer them.

If you took just one idea away from this entire chapter it should be this:

Listen With A Question In Mind!

You can begin with the overall question “If you had to describe this song to someone, what could you tell them?”

To answer that overall question, you can then ask yourself a variety of follow up questions. For example:

• What instruments are present? It might be a rock band of guitar, bass, drums, keys and vocals, it might be a string quartet, it might be a full classical orchestra, etc.
• Can you hear each of the instruments present if it’s a small group, or each of the sections if it’s an orchestra? Of course this can change during the course of a song or piece, so this alone can be a great question to pay attention to throughout. Try to follow one or more of the instruments by ear and stay conscious of whether it’s present and what part it’s playing in the arrangement.
• What’s the overall structure of the song or piece? Which parts repeat and in what sequence? This lets you form a big-picture mental model of the song, and a lot of the other questions we’ll cover can slot into that structure once you figure it out. If you know the proper terminology or theory by all means use it, but a simple labelling system like “section A”, “section B” and so on will work fine too.
• How many measures are in each section? Count it out if you can, e.g. “1, 2, 3, 4 / 2, 2, 3, 4 / 3, 2, 3, 4 / 4, 2, 3, 4, etc.”
• What types of rhythm are being used? Is the beat straight or swung? Are syncopated rhythms being used? Is it the downbeat or the upbeat being emphasised?
• Is the song in a major or a minor key?
• What’s going on in the harmony? You can try to hear which chords are major or minor, or if there are more complex types of chords being used. If you’ve studied Chords and Progressions in your Ear Training, you can try to hear the actual progressions, I-IV-V-I, etc.
• If you’ve been learning Solfa or Intervals, can you figure out the melody notes by ear? It can be handy to have an instrument or a keyboard app on your phone to check if you got it right. This starts to bridge into Ear Training (more on that connection later).
• What production techniques or audio effects are being used? For example, have real instruments been recorded in a simple way, or is it a full-blown electronic creation?

Now as you read through that list, even without a particular track in mind, no doubt some of those questions struck you as “Oh, sure, I could do that” while others had you thinking “Wait, what?! There’s no way I could answer that just by listening.”

Remember the famous principle from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:

Don’t panic!

In this chapter we’re going to equip you with all the concepts and terminology you need to start answering these kinds of questions. And, as you’ll discover below, Active Listening is not a quiz or a test, where you are striving to get every answer “correct”.

The list above is intended only to paint a picture of what will be possible for you in the future, and what well-developed Active Listening skills can deliver you, in terms of musical understanding.

So the core activity of learning and practicing Active Listening is simply to listen to a piece of music, once or multiple times, actively asking yourself specific questions as you listen, and trying to answer them in your head.

Convergent and divergent questions

As part of the Living Music program we were fortunate to have leading educator Victoria Boler present a workshop on the topic of “Creative Listening”, and one valuable distinction she introduced was that musical questions can be either convergent or divergent.

Convergent questions generally have one “correct” answer. For example “what instrument is playing the melody?”

Divergent questions have many possible answers. For example “why do I love this melody so much?”

By incorporating both convergent and divergent questions into your Active Listening practice, you expand your awareness even further and start transforming your listening into a creative practice. We’ll come back to this below, when we talk about “Creative Listening”.