How To Listen To Music

A Companion

Editor’s Note:

Last week, Brady curated a playlist for readers to enjoy. While continuing to offer weekly playlists, Brady was motivated to create this How-to companion for those seeking a deeper appreciation of music. Below, you'll discover an essay discussing techniques and tools to enhance your listening experience and derive greater enjoyment from it.

- Frank Theodat

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Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

Reader, I hope you will forgive the clickbait title, but I could not think of a more appropriate one for this short piece. As odd as it may sound, listening to music is a skill that one can develop just like any other. And like other skills, some basic education goes a long way. I contrast “listening” music with “hearing” music, the former being an engaged endeavor to absorb as much of the richness present as possible and the latter being more what we’d call enjoying background music. Both are perfectly valid ways to take in the music you love. We are not snobs here. However, there is a good deal to be gained even for the layman in acquiring some fundamental music appreciation skills. Now, I am not a layman in this field, having been college educated in this and playing professionally for about two decades. However, this article is geared at general knowledge and I will do my best to refrain from hyper-technical language, jargon, and excessive music theory. If those things interest you, please pursue them. They will certainly do you good, but this piece is aimed at more casual (but still active) analysis. It will also give you some insight into how I evaluate music in my other forthcoming reviews and in my weekly curated playlists. Let’s dive in. 

The Components of Music

This list will by necessity not be exhaustive, but here are a few things to listen for in music and how one might go about it.

Rhythm 

Perhaps the most immediate and primal aspect of music is its rhythmic content. One dictionary definition of music is simply “organized sounds and silences”. This is incomplete, yes, but it’s a good starting place. There are excellent pieces of music consisting entirely of non-pitched percussion. In Western music the standard rhythmic organization is so-called 4/4 time. Without getting into written music concerns, this is just the idea of having four discernible beats before the “bar” or “measure” ends, or in less technical parlance, before the cycle repeats. The vast majority of popular music you will ever hear follows this structure. The next most common arrangement is 3/4 time, which is usually a waltz. As far as practical listening advice, see if you can distinguish if the song or piece you’re listening to follows either of these patterns. Tap your foot and count it out like dance steps (1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4, etc. or 1-2-3,1-2-3, etc). Most things will fit one of those patterns and you will “feel” the pattern repeat with a very natural sensation. This basic activity grounds you in the flow of the music so you can start to perceive more complicated structures on top of it. Some other less common but interesting beat structures are 5/4, meaning 5 beats before the pattern repeats (Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is the easiest reference for understanding this number of beats to a measure) and 6/8, which (we won’t dig deeply into right now) can be counted as groups of 3 or 4 simultaneously, and thus allows for lots of complicated rhythmic figures to happen (progressive metal bands like Opeth, and also Afro-Cuban music, and any other free flowing, complex music tends to favor this time signature). 

The basic take away from this section is to get your toe tapping along to what you’re listening to (if it’s not too complex to do so) and orient yourself to the feeling of the music moving forward. All aspects of music take place in time as it passes. This includes melody and harmony which we’ll discuss below. Getting some sense of rhythm in your physical body is the starting place for all active listening.

Melody

A working definition of melody is “a string of single notes” (as opposed to blocks of notes, i.e. chords, which make up “harmony” discussed below). Now a song or piece of music will have lots of “melodic content”. However, there is usually a “theme” at the forefront and that we call by the name melody. Unless specified, we’re referring to the main (i.e. most obvious) melodic theme of a song by saying “melody”. However, an instrumental part in isolation or even a piece of a guitar riff that is a string of single notes will qualify.

There are a few tests of melodic quality and one is “catchiness”. Now, it’s not the be all, end all of quality melody (heck, the Meow Mix theme is catchy), but it’s a good starting place. In other words, how quickly does it stick with you? Other things to consider are the rhythm and structure of the melody itself. Generally, a melody will follow the pattern I mentioned above with rhythm, with a few other considerations. Usually it will be written in a so-called “phrase”. Phrase is a good word for it because language is an apt metaphor. Thinking of bars or measures (our 1-2-3-4 in 4/4 time), a strong melody will usually have a “call” in one bar and a “response” in the next. Tension and resolution. Sometimes the length of a phrase is longer, like two measures for the tension and two for the resolution, but it will normally be in easily divisible even blocks like that. (Not always, music gets endlessly complex). For practical listening considerations, just listen to the melody before your ears while tapping out the beat and see if you can identify the call and the response structure. A basic example is the last phrase of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, “Mary had a little lamb (tension), whose fleece was white as snow (resolution)”. The vast majority of music follows this kind of pattern with various degrees of increasing complexity. 

Harmony

Generally speaking, harmony is a cluster of notes (aka “chords”) that supports the melody. By support we mean gives it context. Harmony also determines what’s called tonality or “key”. A melody on its own can suggest a tonality but until other notes give it a context, it’s indefinite. You can take a happy sounding melody and put darker chords under it and completely change the character of that melody (see A Perfect Circle’s cover of Lennon’s awful communist gobbledygook “Imagine”). 

Harmony is created by an almost endless possibility of permutations of the 12 notes in our Western system, so it’s beyond the purview of such a piece as this to dig much further here. For listening, simply try to think of the mood the chords create. Usually for major key pieces this will be “happy” and for minor key pieces “sad” (D minor being the saddest of all keys). Obviously, this is ultimately an inadequate method of characterization, but it’s a good starting place. 

Timbre, or Tone

Timbre (pronounced tam-ber) is the unique quality of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds. Sometimes this is called “tone”, not to be confused with “tonality” above, and comes up in a phrase like “I don’t like the tone of the alto saxophone, it’s basically a kazoo”. Now this is not a treatise on acoustics or waveform analysis, but timbre is when we’re talking about why a piano sounds different than a guitar sounds different than a sweet analogue synth. I suppose some things come down to taste, like my hatred of alto sax (sorry Charlie Parker you’re still the GOAT), but it’s also something to pay attention to and try to form some judgments about. As to the “why” some things sound better than others, that’s a discussion for another day. But we can confidently say something like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tone sounds better than Dimebag Darrell’s. That’s timbre.

Some Tips for Listening Based on the Above

Again, this piece is far from a comprehensive music appreciation education, but it suggests some things to apply to our active listening. It also gives you some context for things you’ll hear from me in the future with my music writing.

1. Make sure you are focused if you intend to actively listen. Get in a quiet environment, maybe get some good headphones, and devote your attention to the piece at hand.

2. See if you can tap out the rhythm and identify the time signature. If not, at least get into a groove nodding along or something like that. Dance even! It’s of utmost importance to get the music into your body somehow. Before I was married, I got a lot of laughs from a date when I was rocking back and forth wildly to a Shostakovitch Violin Concerto. Everyone else in the audience was stone. Not good. Music should move you. Literally. 

3. Pay attention to various melodies happening in the piece, especially the main theme. A great way to do this is to “sing along” in your head. Now obviously you can’t exactly do that if you’ve never heard the piece before, but you can mentally repeat it back immediately, so you’re almost in sync with it. It might be clunky at first, but this idea of instantly echoing the melody in your head will zero in your attention on the melodic contours of the piece and will help you track what’s happening better. The melodies will take on a richer feel in your memory as well.

4. Harmony is a tough nut to crack without some education in music theory, but again the salient thing is to look into how it makes you feel. Harmony is one of the most important factors in the emotional content of a piece of music. It works in concert with the other dimensions but it is a prime mover in that case. 

5. For timbre, all we can really say for now is try to pick out the sounds you like. Does the drum kit sound huge like in Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”? Is the guitar distortion gut-shaking? Is the clarinet line smooth and buttery? Does the alto sax sound like a crappy kazoo? (sorry). This is the kind of thing to think about.

Now, don’t try to do all this at the same time at first. Pick a number above, two at most, and dig into a song you know pretty well but haven’t tried to actively listen to. You’ll likely find your experience enriched. 

I haven’t gotten into a lot of other dimensions of music, the most conspicuous absence above being lyrics, but I’m planning some features where we dissect songwriting and the use of lyrics in music. So writers, and just those with a general interest, will want to keep an eye out for those.

Above all, remember to enjoy. Music is an endless source of joy and getting some learning about it, even if it never progresses to the theoretical level, should only enhance the pleasure you derive from spinning your favorite tunes.