What is listening? For decades I’ve heard colleagues describe the process of what listening looks like: sitting still, looking at the person speaking, and being quiet. So the student or even the adult is looking at the one speaking, but what’s really going on in that noggin? No one defines the process of listening. The definition in the Oxford Dictionary is give one’s attention to sound. I’m convinced that there is a large part of the United States that has absolutely no clue how to listen. They can hear just fine, but they have zero idea how to think about what they are hearing.

Yes, Listening really is the process of “Thinking” about what one is hearing. We all are guilty of not thinking sometimes… that we includes me…

My chosen vocation is music education. I did not realize I wanted to be a music educator until my 19th birthday. I wasn’t even contemplating a career in music until March 18, 1986. I will leave the specifics a mystery. Yes, that is a precise date. When I arrived at music school as a tuba player (the college’s lone tuba major.) I was inexperienced green horn and so far out of my league. Over the first two years of my education, I learned how to listen. I had to recognize tonal patterns, pitch intervals, melodic and harmonic dictation, the harmonic series, and I had to learn how to sight sing. I was atrocious at first. I practiced and practiced. I sat in the library and listened to hundreds of hours of music (classical standards mostly.) I learned how to listen to everything around me and to adjust. I’ll be honest it was anxiety ridden work. Failure was around every corner. I hated and loved every minute of it. Now, I would like to share my process of thinking about what I hear.

Horizontal listening: The act of listening to one single voice or melodic line so intently that you can tune everything else around it out. This is my terminology. I’m not a psychologist or an audiologist. This is the listening most people do. Many of my former students when asked what was going on in the percussion section during a specific part of the music theywould look at me baffled. They were only listening to their part: flute, saxophone, trumpet, etc…. When I asked my former choir students what they heard first in a piece of music: Beat, Lyrics, etc. Our brains are really hardwired to do one thing at a time.

Vertical listening: Again my terminology. Listening to all events in time as if they are one distinct process. Imagine an orchestral score of 40 lines on a page. Once you learn each line, you can begin to cohesively imagine what all 40 parts sound like together in time. A concept of ensemble sound. I tend to listen in this matter to most pieces of music and to the environment around me. I hear subtle changes of pitch in the engine or the tires. I hear a dropped vowel (kitt’n rather than kitten) or a soft consonant missing entirely (Pah’ instead of Pop.) I am completely aware of the drone E8 from tinnitus playing along with the Piano Concerto #9 in E-flat major by Mozart… oh now the furnace kicked on adding another dissonant pitch to the orchestra. Have you ever experienced a humming of old fluorescent lights whilst trying to read? Did it bother you? This is the listening I have learned how to do thanks to my musical education.

This listening has made me overly aware (that and the trauma of 3/18/1986) of every detail when I listen to a newscaster, politician, or lecture from a professor. I hear emotion, urgency, lying, passion, and exaggerations. I will be honest, I can’t stand listening to the news, politicians delivering a speech, or a clergymen delivering a sermon. They are all delivering their perceptions or opinions of the facts, and if one truly listens to them you can hear that used car sales pitch. This is why I choose to read the news, read a bible, or read a transcript of a speech. It eliminates the speakers bias or speech incoherence. I can’t believe how many people fall for the sales pitch, but completely ignore the actual message. One can hear a distinct difference if you think about it…

Let’s perform an experiment on oneself. Give it a try. Go see a film, any film. Watch it in the theatre. Really listen to the actors on how they deliver their lines. Did these actors become their characters? Listen to how they phrase their lines, open and shape their vowels, and close their consonants. Examine the pitch and rhythm. Invest yourself into experiencing that performance like no other. Can you visualize or hear the actual actor from the role? Or is the role so believable that it transforms the experience? I feel Cynthia Erivo from the cast of Wicked becomes Elphaba. I feel Laurence Fishburne became Morpheus in the Matrix Trilogy. I feel Jack Nicholson became the Joker in Batman and Jack Torrance in The Shining. You can hear them if you really listen to the detail, become the role. They sound so much different in an interview or a speech.

Are the newscasters, politicians, any different? How about that pitch man for Flex-seal?

We really need to start thinking more about what we are hearing. Think, with a capital T… and so it goes…