Active Listening: How To Practice Active Listening

If you start practicing Active Listening like you’ll learn about in this chapter then when someone mentions a new track, instead of you saying something like:

“Oh yeah, I heard that. It’s a pop song, right?”

You might be able to say something more like:

“Oh yeah, I know that song. It’s got kind of a country shuffle beat to it, simple trio of guitar, bass and drumkit with the vocalist on top. Just follows a basic I-V-vi-IV progression in the verses, with a I-IV-V chorus. Starts out with an intro then it’s just verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus. In that bridge the bassist gets a solo and throws in these great syncopated rhythms to spice things up. The melody pretty much sticks to the major pentatonic in the verses but has these phrases lingering on the 7th note, the “ti” in the chorus which match up well with the lyrics about yearning. I love the barebones sound, just has a little bit of reverb but it’s otherwise totally clean.”

Now you’re not just sounding like a music fan—you’re sounding like a musician!

Imagine having this kind of awareness of every song you hear, and the impact this would have on learning new songs or collaborating with other musicians in a band, as well as the impact on your ability to play by ear or write your own music.

Active Listening is the key to developing a truly aware musical ear.

We might even call it a “mindful” ear. One that doesn’t just drift through its experiences unaware, but is fully present to all the rich detail and structure in all the music you hear, so that you’re able to hear, appreciate, understand and remember it all in a powerful way.

Does that sound like a lot of work?

Well, it’s true that at first Active Listening does take a lot of conscious thought. But in time, although your attention will be focused on the music you hear, you’ll find you don’t need to think through all those questions so much. You will have awakened your ear to everything it can appreciate and be aware of in the music. Most of the question-and-answer process will happen automatically and subconsciously.

On top of that, possibly the best thing about Active Listening is how easy it is to get started. You could literally start practicing right now, using only what you’ve already learned so far in this chapter. Everything that follows will only make it faster and easier to improve.

There are many ways to include Active Listening practice in your musical life. Like Audiation, it’s a skill that you’ll find starts showing up everywhere for you, once you open the door.

You can base your practice entirely on what you’re currently working on in your other musicality training. Or simply begin with your own music collection and the information in this chapter, and start exploring.

You can start out with the basics, like listening for the instruments present and trying to tune in to a particular one throughout the song. Then, with every new concept or skill you learn in music, bring that to the task and ask yourself what this song is doing in relation to that concept or skill, such as tonality, harmony, rhythm, and so on.

You’ll also find a 7-Day Practice Plan at the end of this chapter which suggests an easy step-by-step way to start putting it all into practice.

Active Listening and Ear Training

In some of the examples and descriptions above you might have found yourself thinking “This sounds like ear training” or “How could I possibly recognise that by ear without doing tons of practice exercises?”

The answer is that Active Listening and Ear Training are companion skills.

Either can be done independently, but both benefit hugely from the other.

If you are doing Ear Training exercises, that’s going to give you some powerful skills to add specific detail to the questions and answers you use in Active Listening. And if you practice Active Listening, it’s going to give you extra and interesting opportunities to actually apply all the new skills you’ve developed with Ear Training.

So for example, with only Active Listening and no Ear Training you might describe a melody simply as “It’s an ascending pattern of notes with a long-short-short, long-short-short rhythm”. With some Ear Training that could become “It’s a do-re-mi melody, so if we’re in C Major that’s the notes C, D and E, and that rhythm pattern of quarter note with two eighth notes is played twice”. Or for Chord Progressions with no Ear Training under your belt you would still be able to practice Active Listening and say *”It sounds like that classic 50s “rock and roll” progression in the chorus”—*whereas with Ear Training you could say something like “The chorus is a I-IV-V-IV progression”. And so on.

This means you don’t need to feel obliged to do Ear Training, and you don’t need to worry if you haven’t already developed those kinds of skills. They are a wonderful optional addition to your Active Listening practice.

If you are doing Ear Training then since Active Listening is something you can do each and every time you hear a piece of music, it’s an amazing way to fit in a huge amount of additional useful Ear Training practice in a very practical, applied way.

4-Dimensional Active Listening

The technique introduced above, “Listening with a question in mind”, is the process we recommend for practicing Active Listening.

By itself though, this can leave musicians feeling a little overwhelmed and lost!

That’s why we also developed a framework for classifying the different “dimensions” of music, to help you know the directions you can explore with your ears, and what kinds of questions belong with each.

Later in this chapter you’ll be introduced to those four dimensions and how to start listening for each.

How do you know if you’re getting it “right”?

One big way in which Active Listening differs from Ear Training is in the end goal. As soon as we start talking in terms of “questions and answers”, your mind may have automatically assumed our goal was to get “all the answers right, all the time”.

And naturally, it is generally better to be “right” than “wrong”! :)

But here’s the crucial thing to know: Active Listening is an internal activity which is done as much for the sake of your own experience as for any external results it produces.

We can break down Active Listening’s “question-and-answer” process into two parts:

Are you hearing what you need to hear?
Do you know the correct “name” for that thing?

This applies throughout. For example, it is entirely possible to be 100% aware of the Form of a piece, with an elegant mental visualisation of how it all fits together—without having a clue which bit should be called the “chorus” or whether it is a classical “rondo” structure. It’s entirely possible to be hearing and analysing the instrumental makeup of a piece accurately—even if you have no idea whether one particular instrument you’re hearing is a clarinet or an oboe.

The point here is that yes, it’s great to know the correct terminology wherever possible, and understanding the theory and names for things can actually help you hear and understand more precisely. However: the heart of Active Listening is in the listening, not the naming.

If you took yourself off to live like a hermit in a cave with nothing but your music collection, it would still be entirely possible to become an expert active listener, even with no theory books or teachers or reference material to tell you the “correct” names for all the things you were beginning to hear.

So learning the theory and terminology is helpful for improving your skills more quickly and it’s helpful for communicating the new things you’re beginning to hear. But don’t be intimidated by not knowing that side of things (yet). It is all learnable, and it is not the most important part of learning or practicing Active Listening.

With all that being said: how do you know if you’re getting it “right”?

If it’s just you alone in a room with the music, then the most useful tool you have is self-consistency.

Take the example of musical Form. You might be mixing up the assignment of “verse” and “chorus” when you try labelling the sections of a song. But what matters more is the underlying “ABABABB” or “1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2” structure you’re hearing. So as long as you’re being consistent about which section of the music you’re calling the “verse” and which the “chorus”, that’s the main thing.

Or similarly, suppose you’re mixed up about which audio effect is called “reverb” and which is “distortion”. You might practice Active Listening for a week noticing all sorts of uses of what you think is “reverb”. Does it matter that the correct name is actually “distortion”? For the purposes of training your ear and your mind, no.

Now I realise it might seem strange for an educational book to tell you it’s okay to be wrong! But the valuable work in Active Listening is the time you spend listening and analysing in your mind. These mistakes of terminology can be very quickly corrected.

When someone points out to you that the crunchy sound is actually called “distortion”, not “reverb”—or explains that a “chorus” is the bit that’s always the same words and the words of the “verse” change each time—in an instant, you’re corrected. All the time you spent listening for those things isn’t invalidated. In fact it’s just as valuable as before, you simply make the small tweak to use the right terminology.

So the main thing is to keep putting in the practice, and check yourself for self-consistency.

Now, with that being said, most of us don’t live like a hermit, completely in isolation. So you do actually have a range of options available for “checking your answers”.

Here are a few suggestions:

You can ask a musical friend. Their knowledge and their ears will be different to yours, so they may both hear things you didn’t yet hear, and they may know more about how to describe those things in the common vernacular. You might soon be surprised to discover how much more you are hearing than most of your musical friends, once you start practicing Active Listening.

Tip: If you’re focusing your active listening or you have a particular doubt about a certain thing, such as an instrument or genre of music, it’s great to seek out a musician who specialises in that. Even if they haven’t spent time on Active Listening they may have passively accumulated the ear skills and knowledge required to help you, just through their regular musical activities.
You can ask a teacher. An instrument teacher, particularly one who studied music at a college level or above, will generally have strong ear skills and knowledge that can help check what you think you’re hearing.
You can “ask the internet”. Often a web search will turn up blog posts or discussions about a particular music track or an aspect of music. For example you might search for: “classical music forms”, “distortion guitar effects”, “timbre of different instruments” and so on. Or you might search for “Joni Mitchell voice characteristics” or “chord progression analysis Beatles Let It Be”.
You can “ask your instrument”. Although Active Listening itself is an internal activity in your mind, when it comes to “checking your answers” in some cases it’s helpful to experiment in the real world. For example you could try playing back a melody by ear to see if you were identifying the notes correctly or you could use composing software to enter a rhythmic pattern and see if you were hearing the pattern of notes you thought you were.
You can ask a community. Whether in person or online, communities of musicians can be a great place to ask any Active Listening questions you have. There’s no quicker way to get a discussion going than ask a probing question about the music people love! And compared with seeking out a particular friend or teacher, this way you’ll get a variety of answers that may be more useful than any one expert.

There aren’t many communities that specialise in these “inner skills” of music, but Active Listening questions would be welcome in most online musician communities, and it is a particular focus at Musical U where we love to discuss this stuff, and have experts on hand, as well as many musicians of varying backgrounds and levels of experience.

So as you can see, there are a variety of ways you can “check your answers”—and each of these will typically lead to enlightening conversations and discoveries which advance your Active Listening far beyond the specific question you were seeking an answer to!

Always remember that getting it right is far less important than doing it right. As long as you are paying attention to the music, asking yourself specific, interesting questions, and carefully analysing the music in your mind to try to answer those questions, then you are doing it right.

Creative Listening

With all that talk of “right” answers, and before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the four dimensions of music, now is a good time to return to the idea of “convergent and divergent questions” and how Active Listening could actually become a creative activity for you.

We tend to assume that listening to music is a passive act. With our technique of “listening with a question in mind” you’re hopefully already beginning to see that it can become quite active indeed! More than that, it can become not just an act of consuming or experiencing, but actively creating too.

It’s like that old chestnut “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

In a sense, unless somebody is listening, music does not exist. Sound waves might be moving in the air, but it is not until a person hears it that it becomes music. By listening, we are already creating the experience of music, completing the loop that started when a musician performed, or otherwise conjured up the music in the first place.

Whenever we listen to music, we are constantly making choices about what to pay attention to, and generating judgements and reactions based on what we hear. That goes double if you engage in an Active Listening approach.

We can take this creative role further, with the idea of Creative Listening.

When we take a Creative Listening approach we might:

Bring creative activities to our music listening,
Bring Active Listening activities to our music-making,

In practice, these two will quickly merge for you, as you start to recognise where both creating and listening are happening whenever we’re engaged with music.

You can start bringing more creativity to your music listening by exploring Active Listening questions and activities like the following, which were suggested by Victoria Boler in her workshop on the topic, inside the Living Music program:

Can you move to the music?
What do you naturally notice most about the music?
If this music accompanied a story, what would the story be about?
Can you improvise along with the music? (clapping, singing, with your instrument)
Can you draw a picture of this music?
Can you draw a map of what someone else could listen for?
What’s your favourite thing about this piece?
What would be a good title for this music?
What do you think the creator was feeling or thinking?

Try a few of these out! You might feel self-conscious at first. That’s normal with any creative act, something we’ll be exploring more in Chapter 15: Improvisation and Chapter 18: Performance. For now, just try to suspend any judgement of what you create, and focus on enjoying the creative act itself.

You can start bringing more Active Listening to your creative activities by:

First, just try to bring very engaged attention to listening as you play. Whether you’re performing pre-written music, playing something by ear, or improvising, try to really build up the habit of listening while you play.
Next, you can start using exactly the same kinds of questions you’ll be learning about in this chapter, but applying them to the music you’re playing, not just music played by others.

As you practice bringing more creativity to your listening, and more listening to your creative music-making, you’ll find that Creative Listening becomes a natural and automatic part of how you experience all your musical activities.

Tips For Active Listening Success

Before we continue into more detailed instructions, here are a few general tips we’ve found can help you succeed with Active Listening:

You don’t have to know it all. In fact, you don’t have to know anything! You may be presented with terminology that seems new or strange at first. It is not important that you master it all. Just allow it to wash over you and see what sticks, what seems the most accessible. Remember that concept of a “Loose Grip” Mindset and Convergent Learning. All you have to do is listen with a question in mind. And your question can (and should) be simple, and building on what you know.
Wear good headphones where possible. They will help you access more details in the music. In the past I used to provide people with guidance on what constitutes “good” headphones. These days, to be honest, even freebie headphones tend to be pretty good quality. As a rule of thumb, if you paid money for your headphones or earphones, or they were made in the past five or ten years, they are probably well up to the task. So the main thing to know is “listen on headphones or earphones” rather than relying on speakers. The immersion and isolation makes a huge difference. I should also mention that higher quality headphones or earphones, such as those you would typically pay $50 and above for, can often reveal a greater depth of detail and make some listening tasks easier for you.
Checking is not cheating! Remember the options above for “checking your answers” and keep in mind the Growth Mindset that says every mistake does you a favour by revealing the learning opportunity. So check the answers, listen again, and see how those answers raise your listening awareness.
If you’re a member of Musical U, participate in the community discussions. It’s particularly helpful for developing the skill of Active Listening to learn from what other people are hearing and describing. I’m proud to say we have the most helpful, supportive, and interesting community of musicians anywhere, and our team is also there in the discussion boards every day, ready to help.
Keep moving forwards. Keep it light and fun and don’t get stuck on any one question or task. Your Active Listening skills will grow simply by going through these exercises. You do not have to master everything in order to get amazing results. And you can always come back and review again and again for deeper learning.
Start today. Active Listening is as much a habit, or a way of life for a musician as it is an “exercise” you do or a skill to dedicate practice time to. As noted above, you now know enough already to start practicing Active Listening, even before reading the rest of this chapter. There’s also the 7-Day Practice Plan at the end of the chapter to give you a structured way to get into momentum with Active Listening.

Recap

We’ve looked at what Active Listening is, and some of its many benefits. You’ve learned one simple method for practicing it: Listening with a question in mind. And we’ve shared some guidance for getting up and running with Active Listening.

Now it’s time to introduce the 4-D Active Listening framework which you can use to continually explore further and deeper in all the music you listen to and play.

We will look at each of the four dimensions in turn, and then the “bigger picture” of Form (the different sections of a piece of music) and Texture (how different musical layers work together).