How to listen to a record

A reminder that active listening is a wonderful experience and some tools to help cultivate it.

You have almost certainly heard music today. It is less certain that you listened to any of it.

That is not an insult. It is the condition we all live in now. Listening is an active process. Hearing is passive. Music is in the shop, the car, the advert, the gym, the kitchen, headphones for the walk to work so that the walk to work feels like something.

We are the first people in history who can hear almost anything ever recorded, instantly, for very little money, and what we mostly do with that power is keep the silence off.

This is not exactly a problem. But it means that nearly all of our engagement with music is passive, and that most of us go years at a time without once giving a record our whole attention.

I want to make the case for doing that, and then offer three ways of thinking that make it easier.

step 1. Listen fully

This is very simple and not very easy.

Pick a record. Sit down. Exhale. Press play. Listen. Meanwhile, do not drive, do not cook, do not tidy, scroll, or work. Just listen. Do not do something else while listening, because the something else is the thing your attention will go to. Play it from the beginning to the end. That is the whole method.

You might be surprised how difficult this is. 90 seconds in you might discover you have been thinking about an email. This is not a failure of character, it is simply what attention does, and anyone who has tried to meditate will recognise the shape of it. Listening like this might be spiritual practice – if it ain’t, it’ll do til spiritual practice gets here.

Sometimes, when you really listen to a familiar record, it turns out to have things in it you have never heard. Not obscure things. Whole parts. A countermelody that has been sitting there since nineteen-seventy-oatcake waiting for you to have an unencumbered four minutes. There is such joy in this kind of surprise.

I should declare an interest here. This is the thing I really love about my work. Not the gear, not the artistic problem solving (though I love both). It is the experience of focussing my entire attention on a sound and letting myself really hear it (to the extent that anyone can ever really hear anything).

I find this a truly beautiful, healing, enjoyable (not to mention wholesome and blameless) way to spend time. I would love for you to spend some time listening deeply.

How to do this?

actually, step -1: Make some time

Obviously a requisite here is that one allow oneself the indulgence of a bit of “unproductive” time. That this is an act of ideological insurrection in itself is another subject.

step 2. Direct your attention.

where to put all of this attention? analysis!

The difficulty with full attention is that it needs somewhere to go. The first encouragement is to simply let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. Enjoy yourself.

However, over time, I have found some lovely ways to deepen my engagement with, and enjoyment of, a listen and wanted to share some.

So I offer three “frames for listening”. These are three sets of questions about the phyiscal sound itself. They need no music theory and no vocabulary. You do not have to know what a key is, or a compressor, or which one is the snare.

They are not the whole picture, but they are the three ways to direct and deepen your attention that will work immediately and never stop being useful.

three frames for listening:

Frame	Enquiry	Plane
Localisation	Where is this sound in space?	Horizontal
Frequency	How high or low is it, and what gives it its character?	Vertical
Perceptual “loudness“	How much of my attention is it getting, and why?	!!!

frame one: Localisation

where is the sound?

A record is not flat. It stretches from far left to far right, and everything in it is sitting somewhere along that line because somebody put it there.

Start with what is almost always in the middle: the kick drum, the snare, the bass, the lead vocal. There are reasons for this. Low frequencies are hard to place convincingly off to one side, and the voice is usually the point. So the centre is largely spoken for.

Everything else was a decision. The guitars, the keys, the backing vocals, the tambourine, the noise you cannot name. Listen through them one at a time, simply recognising each and simply asking where it is.

And then notice that things move. A part can drift across, or open outwards as a chorus lands, or vanish from one side entirely. Notice when things might compete for sonic space. Sparseness/ density.

Left and right is only one axis. Even on a mono record there is still “distance” or “size” and “front to back”. Some sounds feel close enough to touch and others feel like they are happening at the far end of – well, of what? This AirPod? Once you start hearing depth you will find that a good record is arranged in three dimensions rather than two, with things standing in front of and behind each other. Maybe things in different sized spaces.

(A quick word on what I think is a generational change in how we hear music: Dolby Atmos and spatial audio. Stereo asks how much of a sound belongs on the left and how much on the right. Atmos asks where it should be in three dimensions. If you have Apple Music or Tidal you have likely been listening to Atmos mixes already without being told. Something to look into!)

frame Two: frequency

how high or low is the sound?

Human hearing runs from about “things vibrating 20 times a second” at the bottom to “things vibrating 20,000 times a second” at the top.

The kick drum and bass guitar are broadly at the lower end, the top is cymbals, air, breath, consonants, detail, and the middle is where most of what you might call “the song” is, including nearly all of the voice.

So, some simple ways in: what is the lowest sound you can hear? What is the highest? How do the elements stack up on this vertical plane? How does that relate to the horizontal plane? Are any of the sounds both low and high?

But it’s not just pitch. (In some ways, the name of a note is the least interesting thing about it.) When you hear the note A, something is vibrating 440 times a second. That number is the fundamental and it is what gives the note its name. But it is not all you are hearing. Sitting above it is a whole stack of quieter frequencies (“overtones”), and the particular arrangement of that stack (which ones are there and how strong each one is) is why a piano and a trumpet playing the same A do not sound the same. It’s called timbre, babe.

Why does the guitar sound thin? The snare boxy? The voice expensive? What makes a piano a piano, and a trumpet a trumpet?

Also: which sounds here seem natural and which have obviously been worked on? Is there anything you cannot identify? Any sound you could not name if someone asked?

frame Three: PERCEPTUAL “loudness”

what is attracting my attention and why?

“Loud” is not a property of an instrument. It only exists in relation to everything else. The bass on a record is never simply too loud. It is too loud for that vocal, in that section, on those speakers.

I kind of think of “loud” as in “demands my attention” as in “that shirt is kinda loud, mate.”

I think maybe the main thing I spend time noticing when listening is “what has my attention at this moment, why, and how is it making me feel?”

Prominence and volume are not the same thing. A sound can dominate because it is louder. It can also dominate because it is brighter, or because it is alone in the middle while everything else is out at the edges, or because nothing else is competing in its part of the frequency range, or because it moved when everything else stayed still, or simply because it has only just arrived.

Another word I use for this idea is “legibility”. How clearly can you read each element or sound source? Why? Is it a matter of relative volume or is it also about space, and frequency, and how busy things are around it? Turning something up is only one of the moves available, and it is very often the worst one. (Because then you have to turn the kick drum up, and then you have to turn the snare drum up and before you know it you are swallowing a lion or whatever).

Once you start listening this way you will begin to catch a record managing you. The small bright thing that appears for two bars in the second verse to stop your attention wandering. The moment where everything else gets out of the way so that one line of the vocal lands. These are decisions, made by people, about what you should notice and in what order. A record that holds you for four minutes is usually working quite hard, and once you can see the work you can start to admire it. Even love it.

things these frames aren’t

Though useful, these frames are far from a complete account. A quick word on some things that are not included:

Duration. Much of what moves you is a matter of what arrives when and what goes away. So we can bring our attention to notice entrances and exits: the bar where the drums drop out, the last chorus that arrives with the bass missing, the effects of such things.

Rhythm and time feel. Whole universes both. Whether a drummer is sitting slightly behind the beat, the nanosecond differences, that you know are there because they make your body want to do one thing and not another.

Then of course small details like harmony, and melody, and lyrics, and historical context, and who the people who made the record are or were and what was happening to them. All real. All very interesting.

And beyond all of that matters of taste: do you like it? Why (not)? What would you change? Why?

But doesn’t analysis ruin the magic?

This is the standard objection. And I do not like it.

But I will leave it to Richard Feynman to put it better than I could. Feynman had an artist pal who argued that he (the artist) had a superior understanding of a flower than did Feynman (a physicist). The artist argued that he could look at a flower and see how beautiful it is in all its profound mystery; while the scientist would have to take it all apart and run it through a machine to tell you it smelled pretty. Feynman felt this was nonsense. He could see everything his friend could see, and also have his enjoyment of it enhanced by an understanding of the the cells, and the structure, and the fact that the colour exists at all because an insect can see it. All of it added. None of it subtracted.

After a lifetime of obsession with why things sound the way they do, records still ambush, amaze and astonish me most days. I still get the shiver. I still feel the magic dust. The hair still stands on end.

I’ve dedicated myself to learning why I got the shiver, why the hair stood on end, where the fairy dust might have come from, and how we can make something that makes someone feel something.

in closing:

Records are made by people making thousands of small decisions on your behalf, nearly all of which are invisible and most of which are agonised over.

Almost nobody ever notices. Noticing is available to anyone, costs nothing, and is a wonderful, rapturous, life affirming experience, and is a skill you can cultivate.

Happy listening!