On Listening

On Listening… Listening is a very personal activity, that is, in its active state. And by active state I refer to listening with awareness. And when one listens with awareness, one listens to every sound one hears in its totality and in its most pure state, without being colored by one’s mind’s assumptions as to the nature of the sound, the origin of the sound or the intention behind the sound. These three traits – the nature, the origin and the intention – are allowed to speak within one’s perception on their own merit. That is, one comes to an understanding of the true nature of these qualities by clear perception rather than by jumping to conclusions based on incomplete awareness.

After a point in one’s musical studies, when one has acquired a certain degree of proficiency with one’s instrument(s), no further progress of any appreciable amount will be achieved without time and attention being paid to active listening.

Three traits of sound, to be contemplated with clarity…

Nature – The nature of a sound is made up of three aspects: color, more commonly referred to as pitch – the pure tone of the sound when timbre and volume are stripped away; timbre, or the texture of the sound – the sonic information that surrounds the color of the sound; and volume – the loudness or softness of the sound. All of these combine to give us clues to the other two traits of sound: origin and intention.

Origin – The proximity of a sound, or its place in physical space, as well as its occurrence in time, define its origin.

Intention – It is not an individual sound event that expresses the degree of forethought involved in its creation but rather the intention behind it: how it relates to other sound events within its sound ecosystem. One must consider the overall framework of sounds and the degree to which they connect to or reference other sounds that happened previously, simultaneously or afterward. When divining the intention behind a group of sounds, one focuses on the nature of each sound – their color, timbre and volume – as well as their origin in physical and temporal space.