An untrained listener'south guide.

During my hour-long commute home from work, when I'1000 likewise tired to even heed to podcasts, I listen to music. More than often than might exist healthy, I listen to Lana Del Rey, every bit she cycles through her doomy refrains about how her life is over, she'southward filled with toxicant, she's running similar mad to heaven's door. With their frothy melodrama, Lana's songs tend to lucifer my postwork mood so precisely that it doesn't feel similar listening at all. I don't have to concentrate or pull myself in. I am already at that place. Listening, for virtually of us, doesn't experience like doing anything. It's more of a awareness than action, a dreamy, ill-defined feeling stretching through usa. We're often not aware we are doing it, or even fully conscious. We literally—when we forget to shut off the television or our Spotify playlists—do it in our sleep.

But sometimes I wonder what would happen if nosotros listened harder, or better, or more rigorously. This might seem exhausting. Am I incapable of relaxing? Probably. Just music scholars insist that if nosotros listened to music the way a musician would, understanding how notes trigger feelings, how tones take on their ain textures and meanings, then we might experience something more than visceral and expansive. We could push deeper into every song.

I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to assemble some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally. Below is a quick, beginner'due south guide to what I learned.

Heed to Dissimilar Genres

As any Deadhead or Belieber will tell you lot, music tastes are etched deep into our identities. They are more than just preferences. They indicate who we are, where nosotros meet the world from: either from the edges or from the duller, denser centers. Music tastes tend to bind social groups, draw lines around them. The fashion, language, and even mannerisms of our favorite musicians oftentimes slowly, unconsciously, get our own.

Ben Ratliff, author of Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty, says that finding new music starts with overcoming our prejudices. "The sticking point is frequently around what appears to be objective intellectual criteria," Ratliff explains, "How tin Ten music be good if information technology doesn't have 'meaningful lyrics' or has trivial harmonic movement or isn't played past acoustic instruments?" This line of thinking, he says, cuts us off. We get genre-stuck. But if we are able to move past our own pretensions, we might discover that not all enjoyable music adheres to our personal rigid criteria.

But be patient. It ofttimes takes several listens for usa to ease into a new sound. Linda Balliro, author of Beingness a Singer: The Art, Craft, and Science, explains that when we hear new music, our auditory cortex is likewise busy processing it for us to fully bask it. She suggests seeking out music that falls only exterior our preferred genre, or that blends ii or more genres together. Cue the approximately hundred thousand remixes of "Old Town Route." For classical music, showtime with a fourth dimension period you savor and so try the one right before or after it. For those new to classical, she says, first with gimmicky classical, such every bit "Dead Man Walking," which has a complex rhythm and language more in line with contemporary music.

Listen in Motion

Since all music is in motion, Ratliff says, listening while moving helps us meliorate connect to the sounds. We pay deeper, closer attention. Arnie Cox, author of Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking, says that listening while exercising creates a composite experience as our listening energizes our movements, and vice versa. Our torso feels lifted, heightened, and so does our listening.

Dancing, unsurprisingly, also enhances what we hear. When listening to a song, Cox explains, we immediately feel around for a style to motility or sing to it. Nosotros rarely simply hear the music, he says. Instead, we comprehend information technology in relation to movement, either that of the performers or our own.

Cox likewise suggests listening while driving, specially on a more than scenic route. As the visual stimulation combines with the move and music, the views tin (quite literally) color what we hear. The colors, contours, and textures smear across the chords, so that we hear them through the filter of our environs.

Listen to the Rhythm

When listening for the rhythm, Ratliff says to listen to the sounds of the percussion first. That'due south the flooring of a song. He suggests starting with Max Roach of Bud Powell'southward group, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, and Ziggy Modeliste of the Meters. He also recommends listening to music with three or more percussionists, like Cuban rumba or Brazillian samba.

Balliro says to pay attending to what happens during the repetition. Organic drummers naturally vary the pattern, says Aaron Fast, a music teacher in Brooklyn, while electronic musicians tend to repeat the same information again and once more. Composers of classical, Balliro says, seek out rhythmic patterns that surprise us. Pop gives u.s.a. more than of what nosotros expect. Heart-searching, more emotional music has slower, more than drawn-out rhythms, stretching notes to sustain the feeling.

Heed to the Tone

Ratliff believes that tone is where the humanity lies, where the emotion sneaks in. The tonal quality that a musician places around a note reveals something near them. It's a confession: this is how I'm feeling correct now. To understand tone, endeavor blending your senses, seeing, feeling, and fifty-fifty tasting the tone. Ratliff suggests imagining the tone as a physical object. How close are you standing to it? How big is information technology? Is it fat or thin? What is information technology made of? Wood? Cotton? Melted chocolate?

Once again, Balliro suggests sampling different genres to broaden your awareness. Listen to songs that are more than emotional such equally blues or jazz, rather than techno, whose tones are reiterative. Symphonies often blend several different tones in interesting waves and patterns while singers like Billie Eilish showroom exquisite tonal shifts in a single hiss.

Heed to the Lyrics

To truly take in lyrics, listen for what's beneath them. Don't become too caught upwardly in the logic. Daniel Godfrey, a composer and professor and chair of the music section at Northeastern Academy's College of Arts, Media, and Design, describes lyrics as the vehicle for music, rather than the other way effectually. Nosotros don't even take to make out the words of the lyrics (and we often tin't) for them to invoke something mystic and unknowable, a awareness beyond reason.

Lyrics, Fast says, often drift in and out of coherence. In his slacker anthem "Loser," Beck deadpans: "In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey / butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie / With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables / dog food stalls with the anatomy pantyhose." While the words may non cohere into narrative, we get the emotional bear on of their meaning: life sucks.

Simply if you truly desire to get to the crux of a vocal, Dustin Cicero, a musician and instructor of electronic music at Emory Academy, says to focus on the chorus. The chorus is our manner into the story, revealing its overall significant and intention via catchy repetition. In the chorus of "Loser," for case, Beck shoots straight to the point: "I'thou a loser baby, so why don't yous kill me?" The droning poetry sums up the song simply besides an era, the unease and disaffection of an entire generation collapsed into a single lyric.

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Listening intentionally might seem similar a by-product of our obsessive demand to optimize. Is listening really a skill nosotros need to hone? But like any other pursuit, such equally dancing or oil painting, deeper listening becomes easier, even instinctual over time. It'southward a process of immersion. We slowly go closer to the audio. Afterwards a few weeks of listening to Lana with a keener, sharper focus, I could listen further, and with more clarity, as if in a higher resolution, without even realizing I was listening at all.

Rachel Ament has written for the New York Times, NPR, Oxygen, Teen Faddy and Paste Magazine, among others.