The Handbook: a Manual for Learning Music.  

Written in all honesty by Rebeka Lyn, musician & technician.

Chapter Two: Learning To Listen.

Old Man: Close your eyes, and tell me, what do you hear?

Young Man: I hear the water…I hear the birds…

Old Man: But do you hear the sound of your own heartbeat?   …And do you hear the grasshopper, which is at your feet?      

—Kung Fu [pilot], 1972

Listening is an underrated & under-appreciated skill set in this modern civilized society of ours.  I would venture to bet that most people would agree that most people feel more comfortable talking than listening.  Oh, the “quiet types” are out there, but we must understand that sitting in quietude doesn’t necessarily imply that one is actually listening.  Listening is actually an engaged activity: it doesn’t just happen because sound waves are passing through the permanently open openings on either side of our heads that the medical establishment calls “ear canals”; rather, it is something that you do with your mind while the sound waves are passing through.

The act of listening is actually an engaged activity that requires an active mind and a passive body.  It is one of those special types of work that looks like you, the listener, is doing absolutely nothing, you know, you’re just sitting [or standing] there…but if we had technology that was sensitive enough to measure these sorts of subtleties, then what it would show would be a million synapses firing in your brain’s neural network as the listener’s mind processes the sound waves passing through their ear canals.  Listening is an activity that requires time, energy, and focused attention for it to happen properly.  Otherwise, what you are actually cultivating is something called “Zombie Mind” …and you are just pretending to listen.

The difficulty of focusing your attention is this: let’s presume that you have the time & energy & desire to listen to—let’s say, your mother talking to you about the difficulties of her day or some drama between her & your father or the stress of raising rebellious kids…how long can you sit there—really listening—before your mind begins to wander? and then, before you know it, your mother’s chatter has become background noise to thoughts about some new sweater you saw in a magazine or some funny something you saw on the television the night before or what you’re going to have for dinner tonight.  Not that there’s anything wrong with letting your mind wander…and the truth is, even the best of us listeners can’t get rid of stray thoughts.  Nor should we, in my opinion.  I’ve harvested some great ideas by letting my mind wonder aimlessly in the woods of undisciplined thought.  

My point here is to point out how difficult it is to control one own’s mind, and really focus.  Mental focus is essential for the development of listening skills, and listening skills are essential for the analysis of and for the creation of good music.  And, unfortunately, the development of true mental focus is not focused upon in this state of highly organized chaos that we call society; it is just sort of assumed that we all already possess this basic skill.  I want to pause here and take a moment to invite you, the reader to share in a moment of honest personal assessment of your own level of mental focus:

Here is a method to test yourself: choose a song that you’ve never listened to before.  Keep an open mind; we musicians have a duty to expose ourselves to all sorts of music, regardless of our personal tastes.  You can turn on the radio, see what’s hot on YouTube, check the newspaper listings for the current Top 40 hits, or ask a younger sibling or niece/nephew or neighbor for their favorite song.  Next, find a quiet space, free of distractions & disturbances, where you can be alone and uninterrupted for a little while.  Listen to the song exactly one time, from beginning to end, trying to follow every lyric, bass line, drum line, chorus, etcetera.  Now, how did you do?  Be honest with yourself…did you actually listen to the whole song, from start to finish…or did it so happen that—try as you might—at some point in the middle of the song, the song itself became a distant backdrop for other issues & thoughts that crowded back in to your mind? [don’t press that “play again” button again just yet]…first answer this question: Can you analyze the song?  What about it made an imprint in your memory? Was there anything attention-grabbing about it, anything unique?  Do you remember a chorus or verse or a melody or an interesting instrumentation as your mental focus probably wondered in and & out of conscious awareness?  Or, if your mind went somewhere else early on, then can you recollect where your attention was at?  What was it that interrupted your focus?  In other words, what were you just thinking about when you were supposed to be listening to the song?

Now, listen to the same song again, and repeat the above exercise.  How many times do you need to listen to the same song before you can honestly say that you have actually LISTENED to the entire song?

See, here’s the situation: all of the instruction books on how to learn to play music jump right in to teaching the theory & practicing the scales.  This is all fine & dandy, but the problem is that these teaching methods, in their eagerness to get right to the meat of the subject matter, make some gross assumptions about the basic human skills fundamental to even being able to properly practice your skills: the student must first be able to sit very still & remain very physically silent for the duration of the practice session.  Next, the student must possess the ability for intense mental focus on the moment at hand and upon the actual activity that he or she or them is engaged in during the present moment—which, in this case, is a practice session with a focus on learning the musical scales.  Then, the student must be capable of the finger dexterity as well as hand-eye-finger coordination required to play the scales in a musical way.  The student must also apply critical listening skills to his or her or their own practice session while simultaneously playing the scales, so that the student can develop awareness of what the scales sound like, and thereby determine when the scales are being played correctly versus incorrectly.  Lastly, the student must be able to repeat this exact practice session day after day, until progress is apparent.

Listening to speech requires the ongoing critical analysis of words in a sequential order as they are being strung together in a [presumedly] meaningful way.  Learning to listen to music, however, is a little more elusive a process…what the listener is trying to listen for is the cohesion between sounds that speak to the presence of the necessary musical elements of rhythm, harmony, and melody, however loosely interpreted they might appear.  

When I was growing up, I felt starved for good music.  The piano teacher thought that classical music was the only real music; my parents were of the opinion that the purpose of music was for worshipping the Christ; and modern society seemed to see music as an opportunity for increasing product sales through dumb jingles associated with advertising products as a rather wasteful & annoyingly elaborate marketing scheme.  Every store at the mall was blasting a different song into the hallways, trying to lure in potential buyers and I felt like I was drowning in the chaos.  The grocery stores were no better, trying to hypnotize the shoppers into giving into the brand-name deals with an unceasing soundtrack of smooth jazz.  The music I heard on the radio was equally disappointing, with its overly synthesized harmonics and overly-simplistic choruses, so much so that I decided I that what I was really listening to was litany of endless rearrangements of the same set of over-used chord progressions.  I remember sitting in my room one afternoon in early spring, when it was just getting warm enough to open the windows.  And in the midst of my depression, again wrestling with my inner self to try & rise above the hungry sensations desiring to drag me into self-pity, I began to hear into the surrounding silence and realized that there is music happening everywhere.  It was subtle, at first, the rhythmic drip of the leaky faucet coming from the adjacent bathroom…the harmonics added by the breeze whistling through the cracked window…and elements of sparse melodies dropped on top by the birds & the bees and whatever else was beginning to emerge from winter hibernation.  I heard nature making music with herself…and then the sound of the vacuum cleaner came from somewhere down the hall and the magic of the moment was ended.  

Chapter Two Challenge: Try to get better at listening & analyzing.  Find another song to listen to, perhaps one that you would like to become more acquainted with.  Listen, focus, analyze, and repeat.  [Remember, practice makes perfect].