Musical U

Honestly? Life's just better over here 😌

Suffice to say, there's a better approach... 😏

Surprising fact: You can be an expert listener without knowing a single music theory term.

One big way in which Active Listening differs from Ear Training is in the end goal. As soon as we start talking in terms of "questions and answers", your mind may have automatically assumed our goal was to get "all the answers right, all the time".

And naturally, it is generally better to be "right" than "wrong"! :)

But here's the crucial thing to know: Active Listening is an internal activity which is done as much for the sake of your own experience as for any external results it produces.

We can break down Active Listening's "question-and-answer" process into two parts:

1. Are you hearing what you need to hear?
2. Do you know the correct "name" for that thing?

This applies throughout. For example, it is entirely possible to be 100% aware of the Form of a piece, with an elegant mental visualisation of how it all fits together---without having a clue which bit should be called the "chorus" or whether it is a classical "rondo" structure. It's entirely possible to be hearing and analysing the instrumental makeup of a piece accurately---even if you have no idea whether one particular instrument you're hearing is a clarinet or an oboe.

The point here is that yes, it's great to know the correct terminology wherever possible, and understanding the theory and names for things can actually help you hear and understand more precisely. However: the heart of Active Listening is in the listening, not the naming.

If you took yourself off to live like a hermit in a cave with nothing but your music collection, it would still be entirely possible to become an expert active listener, even with no theory books or teachers or reference material to tell you the "correct" names for all the things you were beginning to hear.

So learning the theory and terminology is helpful for improving your skills more quickly and it's helpful for communicating the new things you're beginning to hear. But don't be intimidated by not knowing that side of things (yet). It is all learnable, and it is not the most important part of learning or practicing Active Listening.

---

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5: Active Listening in the Musicality book.

To be fair, nobody told *us* either for a very long time... 🤯

There's a middle ground in there somewhere...

When we talk about "improving your ability to audiate", one major focus is the accuracy of your sense of pitch in your mind.

Your ability to judge the pitch distances between notes in music (called "Relative Pitch") is crucial, and it all starts in your mind.

The more accurately you can "hear" the notes and their relationships in your mind, the easier it will be to process and recognise them when you hear them in the real world.

Audiation is a really powerful tool in Relative Pitch Ear Training, because when your ear is trying to figure out the distances between notes, a lot of what you end up doing is mental gymnastics and imagining e.g. "Oh, is it this interval or that interval?"

Another example of the connection between Audiation and Relative Pitch is how a lot of musicians think they "can't sing" because when they try, the pitches don't come out correctly.

Often it turns out that their ability to match pitch and their vocal control (see next chapter for details) are actually fine---but they don't have a clear mental representation of the pitches they intend to sing i.e. they can't audiate the melody.

This is a bit like trying to hit a bullseye without having a clue where the dartboard is!

---

This is an excerpt from Chapter 3: Audiation in the Musicality book.

Real music doesn't come with a green checkmark 🙃