WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HEAR?

Sept. 20th, 2023

The distinction between hearing and listening is well known: we hear sound, we listen to someone, or to music. Hearing and listening describe a common relationship we have with sound, but the difference is in the way we attend to it. What is that difference exactly, and how do we learn to hear – and listen – better?

Listening, playing, and imagining music through the years has significantly shaped the way I experience sound: the way I listen has changed, meaning, what I pay attention to while listening has transformed, which is certainly the result of a lifetime exposure to music. This is a common experience for trained musicians as well as for those for whom music has always been an important part of life. It is through exposure that one develops the ability to direct their attention towards an aspect of sound or another, which is what musical education possibly aims at: a musician learns to distinguish sounds to the highest level of refinement, like a visual artist distinguishes between shapes and colours.

The way I generally attend to sound has changed: I witness the change from daily life experience, since every piece of music I listen to today communicates a greater deal than it would have done ten, twenty years ago. But sound itself has changed too. This is not so obvious, as we generally assume that we hear sounds in the same way. The engine of a car, the doorbell, someone’s voice, a note of the piano: we might tell ourselves different stories about what these sounds are and what they mean, but they seem to reach us in the exact same way. Is this true? Do we all agree what a sound sounds like, at least as we agree on what the colour red looks like: do we hear the same sounds?

I strike a note at the piano and the sound appears to be always roughly the same: tuned or less tuned, always nice enough. I feel though as that note has more dimensions and significance than it would have had only ten years ago. Even when I play delicately it sounds deeper, larger, it fills the room and surrounds me. It is only one note, but it contains a life, my life, and carries projections and expectations built in decades. Holding down a note for a moment, the sound seems to barely resist the urgency for moving on to somewhere else: is vibrant, unstable, filled with possibility. Is it all in my imagination? What do I hear? Is it possible that the key to music is just in the way we hear sound? What does it mean to hear?

In his ‘Aesthetics of Music’, the philosopher Roger Scruton suggests that humans have the distinct ability to hear a sound and to identify it as a ‘tone’, which is the first step towards turning acoustic phenomena into representations of intentions, in other words, music: what makes us hear sound as music is the intention we detect in it. If that holds true, music is not an intrinsic quality of music, but like beauty, is in the eye (the ear in this case) of the beholder. We hear sounds, we experience music.

A practical example. I tend to choose the music to learn after hearing it played by someone else, which is quite a common way to get passionate about new music: I form an idea of the piece through listening, which slowly convinces and motivates me to learn it. The excitement I get in the beginning is generally short-lived: the musical appeal weakens as I find myself immersed in problems to solve, fingering instructions to follow, all sorts of intricate coordination details and nuances, very soon too many and complicated to handle.

Inevitably, as the piece improves I noticed that the process of learning transforms that initial idea almost completely, challenging me to reframe its first appeal. New aspects of the music are discovered and it’s almost embarrassing to admit how much I was missing when just listening. Under my fingers the whole perspective on the piece changes, as if it was not even the same piece. I can now almost witness in real time how the weight carried by the notes transforms right in front of me, the dots on the paper start forming patterns, sequences, they become part of a larger design, sound turns into a living thing: the notes start meaning something other than just notes. With time the music improves, and I seem to grow new reasons to like it: interestingly, the picture I initially had of the piece becomes outdated and a new one emerges. So I wonder: what was I hearing? What was I impressed about on first hearing?

Perhaps the clue is not in the sound (the matter we perceive) but in what we associate with it (the tone, adopting Scruton’s term). Any attentive and passionate listener knows well how much of life (emotions, ideas, memories, etc.) can be intuitively associated with music. The joy of listening resides perhaps in grabbing the opportunity that a piece of music offers, joining it with our attention and responding with our own creativity. As active musicians we must create these associations from scratch and convince our listener that there is more to what they hear than just the notes we are playing or writing. We must the first to recognize that sound by itself is not enough.

I try to communicate to my students that, in order to improve their playing, sound needs to say more than the note, but I realise how cryptic and confusing this appears. Let’s take it from a different perspective: what does it mean to hear for a blind person?

Without vision someone has to rely primarily on the auditory system to make sense of the world and function in it. In a way sound already signifies more to someone blind then it does to a normal-vision person, because it carries important, sometimes vital information: it informs of the presence of objects (sources of sound), their position, distance, and movement in space, it helps defining the size and proportions of small and large objects, rooms, spaces. The sound, tone and depth of a voice might tell the intentions and emotional state of the speaker beyond the words they are saying and what their faces express. Sound for the blind is a three-dimensional map they can use to navigate the world, like vision is for most other people.

In a way, what the blind has developed is a 360-degree appreciation of sound, motivated by necessity, reinforced by exposure, refined by trial and error. As a thought experiment, we can imagine to be blind for some time, close our eyes and have a sense of how much information about the world is conveyed by sound only. Let’s imagine now all the sounds out there being replaced for a moment by music, violins, choirs, trumpets, songs, symphonies: everywhere we turn it’s just beautiful music. What would the world look like then, how would you represent it in your mind? What spaces, colours, movements, events, intentions, emotions would you recognize in such a world, a world which you can’t see?

I believe we can learn something from this thought experiment: for different reasons musicians and blind people have become highly sensitive to sounds, they learned to interact with the world of sounds at a more personal level. I suspect that blind people and musicians hear more than everyone else (which is not to say that musicians will be better off blind, or that blind people are more naturally talented for music…). Would it be possible, or even desirable, for normal-vision people to hear sound in the way a blind person does? Can music inform us about the world, communicate ideas or emotions like a picture does?

Another quick thought experiment: let’s visualize for a moment a rectangular shape in the red tonality. The colour red fills the frame and is just… red. Colour is just colour; it is meaningless, like sound is just sound. There is nothing inherently special about it, but the Russian-American artist Mark Rothko is celebrated around the world for his paintings where the observer is presented with big, sometimes massive canvas with one or two colours and little shades, no contours nor drawings. The painter is telling that there is more to see than red. By the impressive size of these works we can only imply he is commanding us: ‘Just look!’ Can there be more than just red? Surely Rothko sees more in it than we do, perhaps an intention, an emotion, an idea: by exposing us to it and challenging to find meaning, Rothko is teaching us how to see.

We learn how to see through visual art, thanks to visionaries who did see more than everyone else: is it perhaps that we learn how to hear through music? Developing the ability to see and hear is the way to access what colour or sound might mean, though it is not in colour nor in sound that we are going to find art and music, but in the way we attend to it. Then, how do we hear more? How do we hear better?

Shapes, colours, intentions, emotions, designs, ideas, movement, vibrations, and everything your imagination suggests is what music is made of, and that's the reason why you're listening, not notes. To hear music is to hear past the notes. Music is not a matter of sound really, as I am trying to articulate. If the enjoyment of music is not in the notes, playing shall not be any different: create shapes, colours, make your intention clear, describe a movement, persuade your listener of what you mean. The more attention you pay, the more interesting the sound becomes, and your sound starts carrying more, it grows more layers, new dimensions start building up in your playing. All comes out as you listen, carefully, patiently. How much information can a sound carry, how much of reality is contained in that sound?

I enjoy music with my eyes closed, so I often try to practice in the same way. Besides its technical benefits, I realise how I am momentarily pretending to be blind, shutting down my visual map of the world and attempting to find meaning in sound only. This temporary, voluntary blindness triggers other parts of my being to wake up: my body starts moving, attention is now flowing more freely from head to feet. I don’t just hear better what I play, but every other sound around me, cars outside, far away chattering of people, and the soft wind, a gentle tick of a clock, a noise from the neighbour, my breath. Very much like meditating, no?

Hearing, then, is done by the ear, but the sound you’ll hear depends on how you are using your attention, imagination, your body, intuition, creativity, and freedom. That is a very active endeavour, which can develop and improve: ultimately that is, I believe, listening.