Listening

Everything begins with listening. It is an essential tool (and skill) for life and consequently it is the building block of everything that happens in making music. Everyone needs to think about how they listen, not just to music, but in their everyday experience of the world. It is important to develop this awareness and to think about how to control it and its effect on perspective. What do you find yourself listening to? Do you ever play with shifting your awareness and recognizing different layers of sound, effectively turning some on or off? Do you ever think of the sound around you in the context of music? These are important questions to think about.

If we open up the definition of music to be more concerned with how sound is organized rather than what types of sounds are used, we can embrace a wider range of potential and a flexibility of how we listen to the world. The key to listening is to listen attentively. In this context this means the ability to really hear what is around you, to listen to multiple layers of sound, and to hear those layers on multiple levels. It is to be aware of what is happening around you and to think about possibility and what associations certain sounds conjure for you, which can ignite musical inspiration. How you hear things and what sounds mean to you are part of your unique perspective and can be harnessed further but first need to be acknowledged and addressed in order to be constructive. Your personal experience informs how you approach your work and that should be utilized as a benefit that helps to develop a personal style.

Listen. Repeat. Listen. Repeat.

Listening to the same thing repeatedly allows you to change your perspective repeatedly. You'll hear different things, gravitate toward different things, find potential in things you hadn't paid attention to before. In the same way that watching a movie a second (or third) time allows you to see different aspects because the basic storyline is now a known quantity, listening to the same recording repeatedly allows you to hear it differently, to pay attention differently. On the first listen you may notice moments that are louder or that you remember from the recording process but once those aspects are known you hear others in a new way, and on the third listen you hear what you paid less attention to on the second listen, and so on. These sounds that emerge may be the most exciting parts of that recording.

It's important to note that there is no need to like everything you hear. The goal isn't to find the potential in anything but rather to be aware that that potential exists, and then to narrow it down to what you personally hear potential in, what types of sounds you gravitate towards and how you might want to use them. Developing your listening style is a giant step towards developing your musical style because listening determines sound selection, editing choices, and arrangement, which all adds up to the sum of your work. We are training our ears constantly, both to continually exercise that sonic awareness and to consistently develop our instincts of what we want to hear, what we want to create, and how to do that.

The following assignment reminds one to listen carefully and attentively, so consider not just what you think you are looking for but the possibilities inherent in the material. I am asking you to reconsider the importance of activities and processes of thought that may not be directly linked to what you want to work on, but are still quite important in the overall picture, in the world of sound that you are developing, and in the range of thought and influence that you need in order to fully flesh out that world.

Assignment:

Record five minutes, of anything you wish. It can be outdoors, indoors, objects, spaces. It can be a single five-minute recording or shorter recordings totaling five minutes. Please listen to the recording(s) carefully. Listen several times and think about what sounds you might want to edit out of it. Please don't actually edit anything yet but simply consider it and take notes on what sounds you would pull out and why. Think about what you're listening for, what stands out for you, and why it does.

Questions for Listening / Recording Assignment:

Why did you record what you did?
What were you hoping to capture in it?
Did you capture it? If not, why do you think it didn't follow expectations?