how do you hear music?

Yeh.

The emotional bit is the only thing that matters to most people in the world. How a piece makes you feel is most important. When you listen in this way, you're hearing the connections that are being made with our collective consciousness.

When you listen in the other way - 'Trained fan/critic' ears (I would include musically trained ears) - it is possible to appreciate musicianship, arrangement, composition and so forth; but this can dampen your capacity to read the emotion of the piece. Your reaction will be shared by some other 'trained fan/critic' ears, but not all.

So on the 'trained' level I can appreciate, say, Drukqs - but on an emotional level I find it impossible (either it's shit or it just succeeds in doing my head in).

Not expressing myself very well, but here's another example: I know someone who is not trained. She used to hear songs as consisting purely of the lyric and the vocal melody. She then started writing songs and only then started hearing other elements. So I think if you wanted to, you could learn the other way of listening. But your current way (would you call it 'gut reaction'?) is, I think, why people start making music.

Ways of listening

My listening falls into distinct categories. The type Luka describes above where music alters or enhances a mood; a less active form of listening, the mind disengaged but the heart stuttering, soaring, filling etc.

Then there's what you might describe as narrative listening; the brain understanding melodies, parts, rhythm as part of a greater horizontal progression. In this case the smile is wry and in/from the mind.

i find it totally impossible to relate the sounds of electric guitar to the instrument - even if i'm watching the musician, i have no concept of instruments like oboes or violae or which bit of the orchestra makes which sound.(apart from the cannons and cymbals obv)
But then i have never been trained in music, not even the recorder, never strummed anything, can't sing for toffee
i reckon it must help enormously to be able to read music

i experienced similar effect with arabic, which has a few letters that are not found in english that i could not hear properly or pronounce until i learnt the alphabet

As someone who has, I suppose, a 'classically trained' ear, I find that it's something you have to learn to switch on and off. Halfway through my degree I suddenly realised that I was forgetting to listen to music sensually, and was just hearing it as technique. I could hear what the harmony was doing, but it was about as moving as a crossword puzzle. That freaked me out a bit - it's something that can happen when you analyse things too much - so I taught myself to listen emotionally again. It sounds very artificial, but it had to be done, and once you've gone down some roads you can't just pretend that you haven't. So now I usually listen halfway between the two. If I want to listen analytically and pick something apart to explain why something it is having a certain effect on me, I do; if I just want to feel it, I do. (obv different types of music work better one way or the other)

what music makes you feel sexy luka?

Again, not having a trained ear i find this question interesting. i think i have changed how i listen to music over the years - i used to be very lyric led and can still reel off whole songs from 20 years ago without any bother, however in the 90s i got into non-lyric led music and since then i have found that even on my return to lyric based music i am much more interested in the totality of the sound - the surge of sound and its emotional aspect instead.
i think it also depends on how you are listening - since getting an ipod i find i listen to music differently when compared to listening via the stereo at home - with earphones everything is pushed up front and closer to your ears - you are (obviously) forced to listen, usually to the exclusion of all other sounds, this has led to me hearing lyrics on albums i have long had but not bothered deciphering and also appreciating the layering of a track in a way that i wouldn't have noticed previously.
however in the end i find the music that matters the most to me is the stuff that i connect to on some pre-intellectual, pre-analytical level - i can provide analysis for why i like it but the joy is not in the analysis but in the directness.
i find the gap between my experience and my explanation may be hampering comprehension here, but it's the best i can do at present - now you lot stop being so interesting - some of us have work to do!

hmmmm...i'm a little cynical about 'trained ears' and whether they're any 'better' at listening to music than someone who knows nothing at all about how the music was made/composed/recorded whatever.....

one interesting thing....repetetive listening, championed by some of the Concrete chaps in
France in the 50s...listening over and over again to something precisely so u can LOSE that training that some hold so high...thats interesting i think, academic people trying to become less academic....

i certainly don't think i'm any better at hearing things than someone who has never studied music...i actually think that what luka said is true...sometimes i long for the days when a tune was just a tune, and u didn't obsess over every little part of it....

i weirdly think everyone goes thru the same thing...like, music sometimes is just there, and yr hear it, but then it jumps right out, and transports u and affects u, and that happens to me still...tho i find it needs to be loud to do that these days! having had so many epiphanies at raves, quiet music has to work even harder with me! I think
Metalheadz permanently damaged me!

training

i wasn't talking "trained" in the sense of musicological knowledge or how music works or any of that

just purely on the ability to aurally discriminate between the different strands of sound

like, frinstance, anybody who's deep into beats as i'm sure luka is, is listening in a way --attuned to minutiae of rhythmic inflection, drum timbre, how drums locks with or move away from the bass -- that listeners who aren't steeped in hiphop/rave/uk garage won't even pick up on or be aware of, all they hear is is this pounding beat -- what seem to us obvious differences in genre aren't even discernible

my granny for instance thought all pop music -- from cliff richard to disco-- was "just beat" -- a listener of her generation could only hear the stridency of the rhythm

similarly luka presumably listens to mc's flows in a (self) trained way, through being deeep deep into it for years and years, he i('d imagine) attends (without even being conscious of it maybe) to who's doing interesting things with the beat, rather than just purely responding to the emotional content the MC is delivering

after all if it was just emotion that made music matter, anyone could make great music cos we all have great emotions

it's the structuring of emotion that = music


>So on the 'trained' level I can appreciate, say, Drukqs - but on an emotional level I find it impossible .(either it's shit or it just succeeds in doing my head in).

ah but you see Eggman, it's the "trained" ear that tells me Drukqs is shit, just over-addled fidgety digital effects-riddled nonsense AS WELL as the emotional hollowness of the record c.f. the aching beauty and poignancy/alien-ness of the early Aphex stuff

but yeah as i said i can distinctly remember hearing a bassline as a separate thing for the first time when i was i dunno 12 or something, whenver it was i consciously started listening to pop music -- before then it was an undifferentiated blur of sound

i think maybe the aesthetic of blurring/sonic miasma c.f. my bloody valentine or whatever may be an attempt to recreate that more innocent undifferentiated experience of music

I certainly don't think 'training' is necessarily better. Actually, I sometimes worry that it can spoil things, in an 'oh, I know how he does that' kind of way. I had a teacher once who said that he didn't find any music difficult to understand, it was all easy listening for him*, and I thought that was both sad and not a little scary. I'd hate that - it would be like going to magic shows when you're the head of the Magic Circle or something.

*(apart from John Zorn, which was the point he was making in the context of the lecture)

eggman - i like that!

after all if it was just emotion that made music matter, anyone could make great music cos we all have great emotions

it's the structuring of emotion that = music

i weren't sayin that being able to feel emotion from music made you capable of composing it - just that it makes you capable of hearing it in the most profound way.

but great musicians, of course, must be able to balance both.

and i think there's a leap again from being a great performer of your own work to being a great performer of someone else's work. for example, will young - singing other people's songs or his own - has not communicated any emotion since pop idol. but watching him do ain't no sunshine on pop idol before he won - you could feel it. i don't think i could cover someone else's song and really connect emotionally with an audience. maybe that ability develops. maybe it's down to finding the right song.

blissblogger said:

i wasn't talking "trained" in the sense of musicological knowledge or how music works or any of that

just purely on the ability to aurally discriminate between the different strands of sound

like, frinstance, anybody who's deep into beats as i'm sure luka is, is listening in a way --attuned to minutiae of rhythmic inflection, drum timbre, how drums locks with or move away from the bass -- that listeners who aren't steeped in hiphop/rave/uk garage won't even pick up on or be aware of, all they hear is is this pounding beat -- what seem to us obvious differences in genre aren't even discernible

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Definitely, but actually I think that academic training and training as in knowing a genre inside out like you describe Simon are parts of the same continuum. Musicology/academic training in most cases just gives you a vocabulary to point out what you're hearing (and it encourages you to listen in a way that accords with that vocabulary, which is the aspect that can be damaging). Being able to hear something specific (harmony, rhythm, melody, repetition, beat, bar, quotation, whatever) in the first place just comes, and either familiarity or enforced tuition gives your brain a framework for dealing with it.

Academic vocabulary encourages a horizontal approach I think - harmonic progression, large-scale form, that sort of thing. The rhythmic inflections you mention are more vertical, moment by moment things, something that academic training refuses to prepare you for, but who's to say which is better or more valuable? I've never had a problem isolating strands of sound, but my feeling for rhythm is terrible (how much of that is nature or nurture is anybody's guess though).

Here's an interesting post by Kyle Gann in a similar vein:

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/archives20041201.shtml#93445

i was a cathedral chorister from about the age of 7, and played the violin from then too. it meant training and learning music every day, sure i felt emotion for some of the music but in other ways it was a job and not the sort of thing a wee kid should be doing maybe. Literaly doing school plus practicing singing for 4 and a half hours a day on top of that. It was also locked into a religious system.

I was getting my non religious modern music kicks like crazy, even when i was there, to try and counter the proper training, but when i left the choir and my voice broke i went mad for it, just trying to absolutley kill the training and religious thing and really enjoy music again on a democratic sensual level.
It was well hard but ulitimatley worth it, but now im a bit shit at reading music, which is a shame.

I sometimes think some training wouldn't go amiss to increase peoples pallettes and understanding of melody, timbre and arrangement, god knows music needs that, but as usual schools aren't really up for the challenge and some people are getting on changing music and our perceptions everyday anyway.

anyone ever recieved any cds from the sonic arts network fer instance?
No engagement with anything apart from theory and pretty dull output i think, that's a shame. Then you got people doing really amazing things with no academic understanding and they're wicked.

A lot of my favourite sounds are orange. A lot of SAW II is orange for me. Rhythms tend to be transluscent grey shades. Bass is a dark space with faint shades running through. Dirtier basses have rough colourful edges. I'm not synaesthetic, I don't think. I mean my world isn't awash with sound-colours that impede my daily activities. But in my mind sounds do have distinct shapes and colours. More on so on mushrooms. With a little help, everything I touch starts oozing sonic/visual spectra.

The thing is, how much 'training' do people really need? There's this feeling that basic technical/descriptive language for music is completely inappropriate and just turns people off - you almost never see it in mainstream music criticism. Good film criticism can be pretty technical or draw on a certain amount of theory - and any broadsheet will print a feminist critique of Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives - but try doing the same with music and people freak out. Why is that?

I was on this a bit recently because I was told that hearing is the first sense developed in the womb, like four months into one's development maybe. And then sight comes along and totally takes over. And it was pointed out that sound is an enveloping sensory stimulus, whereas sight is penetrating. Sound, you gotta kinda lose yourself in it, maybe relinquish control a bit more and let it work on you. Perhaps it leaves a human feeling a bit vulnerable, open to the universe. Sight is very me-centric, I swivel and control my point of focus, I turn to meet what it is I wish to see head-on, whereas sound can come at me from any direction, and I may or may not be able to locate its source...

Right, my point being that I think a lot of people and at least US culture in general (which is the only one I can speak on with any experience) puts so much more emphasis on the visual that sound is a soft spot for many people. My experience has been that people I know, regardless of intelligence, often don't want to cross a certain analytic line when talking about music, and the same people will go as far as they please into the dissection of a book or movie. In this culture, without some kind of formal training many people feel lost around an instrument or the idea of intellectualizing sound, but the visually based language of the culture is just absorbed I think from day one.

Rambler said:

The thing is, how much 'training' do people really need? There's this feeling that basic technical/descriptive language for music is completely inappropriate and just turns people off - you almost never see it in mainstream music criticism... people freak out.

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I confess my naivete but recently read a bit of Lester Bangs for the first time, and thought that what he did really well was to explore the emotional connections of the music, not so much a thought process but a feeling process.

By the way where does one find mainstream music criticism? (genuine question)

what on earth is a trained ear anyway? I mean I studied music to a certain extent, learned to play an instrument and learned some theory, both from a teacher rather than teaching myself. But I wouldn't say that my ear was really trained, I just learned how to translate sheet music to playing and what the 'rules' of time signatures & key signatures are. I've forgotten most of it now and I wouldn't say it had a massive bearing on the way I listen to music - I think if I was breaking down music whilst listening to it, recognizing keys & chord progressions for instance, I wouldn't enjoy the experience as much.

btw why is almost all the music we listen to in 4/4 time?

minusone said:

btw why is almost all the music we listen to in 4/4 time?

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it's easier, your heartbeat is 4/4 more or less and you walk like that, it's uniform innit