Open Your Mind and Your Ears Will Follow
When describing great works of art, people often jump to list their favorite movies, books, and paintings. While no one can deny the magnificence and near-unanimous personal impact of well-acclaimed classics such as The Shawshank Redemption, “Divine Comedy,” or The Last Supper, it seems a certain auditory artform has been forgotten.
The scape of music generally tends to play in its own field—wonderful for music as a cultural phenomenon, horrible for it as an artform. Music is much more accessible than other artistic mediums, only occupying the ears and leaving the eyes to focus on the tasks of daily life. However, in treating it as background noise rather than art, many have overlooked music’s essence: a profound form of creative expression through sound.
In my years of experience, I’ve designed a reliable plan to unlock a deeper emotional connection to music through tactical listening. I believe there are two main everyday listening disciplines, one I’ll dub “explorative listening,” and the other “background listening.” The former is the focus of this essay, and as the name implies, it is the act of listening to music with the goal of discovering something new.
Your starting point should be an artist. Now, before you press play, it is important to rid yourself of as many distractions as possible. To effectively exploratively listen, you must focus solely on the music. That means, no doing homework, playing games, or reading—we have a separate kind of listening for that. Once the external stimuli are gone, ensure that you have some direct device-to-ear connection. Finally, after all this setup, feel free to navigate to the chosen artist’s debut album, and enjoy your listen.
If you skip tracks of an album or minutes of a song on your first listen, you may as well just grab the artist by the hair and spit in their face while disparaging their work—well, maybe it’s not that crazy, but don’t do it! Your first run through of any album should be in its entirety. That way, you’re capturing the full essence of the music and making subsequent listens easier.
Once you’ve finished your first listen, it’s good to go back and relisten to all the tracks, paying more attention to the specifics of the sound. You don’t have to be a music theory expert; taking note of interesting sounds, climaxes, or even lyrics should suffice. However, if you are an avid musician, it would be wise to break down the songs, taking note of keys, rhythms, chords, and everything that makes the song so interesting.
Before we continue, I should advise you that there do lie some caveats in this all-encompassing guide to listening, and it would be unwise of me to exclude them. Though I do disagree with the practice of skipping to the “good parts” of songs, or the “good songs” on an album, I must concede that listening to an artist’s big hits is a fine way to familiarize yourself with their sonic qualities.
Such methodology has led me to discover some of my favorite artists, notably Television with their “Marquee Moon” and David Bowie with his ever-so-emotional “Heroes.” In a similar vein, it is also permissible to listen to an artist’s most famous/well acclaimed album as your first to better see if you’d like to dedicate yourself to their complete discography—the catalog of their recordings.
Seeing as you’ve familiarized yourself with the songs, you should be quite curious about the artistic choices behind them. Many artists have at least a handful of interviews regarding their music. Along with interviews, consider certain cultural factors that could have led to the soundscape. Such factors include, but are not limited to, location and major historical events at the time. Now that you’re armed with the full knowledge of the album, it’s time to document your thoughts.
I’ve used a wide variety of music reviewing mediums in my lifetime, ranging from the globally recognized Rate Your Music (RYM), to the slightly-lesser known Album of the Year, and even the solidarity of my iPhone’s Notes app. Recording your thoughts is the most important thing you can do for your listening besides the listening itself.
With all the reviewing now done, you can move to the next step of the operation, which is luckily laid out in chronological order for you: listen to the artist’s next album and repeat! Once you’ve exhausted the artist’s studio material, you have two angles to choose from. You could either listen to all of their easily accessible live material, or take a little break.
If you’d really like to challenge yourself, what I do is listen to everything by the artist in chronological order, singles, lives, and all, but that can be quite a burden, so by all means, take a little discography hiatus. After your break, pick another artist, and start the cycle all over again.
Now, I encourage you to channel your newfound bank of listening knowledge and attempt the strategies discussed above to both the music you listen to in daily life and that which you will continue to find for the rest of it.
As you continue to walk the path of the self-appointed music scholar, you should hold with utmost importance the idea that music is a means of emotional expression. To hear a song is to understand the fundamentals of its structure; to listen to music is to feel the emotion of the artist deep within.
