We rarely simply hear the music, he says. When listening to a song, Cox explains, we immediately feel around for a way to move or sing to it. Our body feels lifted, heightened, and so does our listening.ĭancing, unsurprisingly, also enhances what we hear. 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. Since all music is in motion, Ratliff says, listening while moving helps us better connect to the sounds. For those new to classical, she says, start with contemporary classical, such as “Dead Man Walking,” which has a complex rhythm and language more in line with contemporary music. Cue the approximately hundred thousand remixes of “Old Town Road.” For classical music, start with a time period you enjoy and then try the one right before or after it.
She suggests seeking out music that falls just outside our preferred genre, or that blends two or more genres together. Linda Balliro, author of Being a Singer: The Art, Craft, and Science, explains that when we hear new music, our auditory cortex is too busy processing it for us to fully enjoy it. It often takes several listens for us to ease into a new sound. 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.īut be patient. “The sticking point is often around what appears to be objective intellectual criteria,” Ratliff explains, “How can X music be good if it doesn’t have ‘meaningful lyrics’ or has little harmonic movement or isn’t played by acoustic instruments?” This line of thinking, he says, cuts us off. The fashion, language, and even mannerisms of our favorite musicians often slowly, unconsciously, become our own.īen 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. Music tastes tend to bind social groups, draw lines around them. They signal who we are, where we see the world from: either from the edges or from the duller, denser centers.
Below is a quick, beginner’s guide to what I learned.Īs any Deadhead or Belieber will tell you, music tastes are etched deep into our identities. I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to gather some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally. But music scholars insist that if we listened to music the way a musician would, understanding how notes trigger feelings, how tones take on their own textures and meanings, then we might experience something more visceral and expansive. We literally-when we forget to shut off the television or our Spotify playlists-do it in our sleep.īut sometimes I wonder what would happen if we listened harder, or better, or more rigorously.
We’re often not aware we are doing it, or even fully conscious. It’s more of a sensation than activity, a dreamy, ill-defined feeling stretching through us. Listening, for most of us, doesn’t feel like doing anything. I don’t have to concentrate or pull myself in.
With their frothy melodrama, Lana’s songs tend to match my postwork mood so precisely that it doesn’t feel like listening at all. More often than might be healthy, I listen to Lana Del Rey, as she cycles through her doomy refrains about how her life is over, she’s filled with poison, she’s running like mad to heaven’s door. During my hour-long commute home from work, when I’m too tired to even listen to podcasts, I listen to music.
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