A major milestone in your musical development is learning how to listen to music like a musician…
So, how do you listen to music? How should you listen to music? What should you listen to? What should you listen for?
Keys to Listening like a Musician
Music is not just about sounds, but about feelings. For this reason, Piano-ology uses the term sound-feeling to describe the experience of musical listening.
Musical patterns perform musical functions. In other words, it’s not just about what a musical something is (a noun). It’s also about what that something does (a VERB).
Successful listening isn’t achieved by “trying” to hear something. It’s about being receptive to the sound-feeling that you are experiencing.
The building blocks of music (scales, chords, chord progressions, etc.) should always be studied and practiced with your ears fully engaged. Not sometimes. Not most of the time. Always.
Notice that every Piano-ology lesson on scales, chords, chord progressions, and real music always integrates theory and ear training.
The sound, feeling, and function of a musical pattern always depends on the context. For example, the note F# in the key of D Major has a totally different sound, feeling, and function than the note F# in the key of G Minor.
The location of a note within the fabric of time (the form, meter, rhythm) has a huge impact on the way it sounds, feels, and functions.
Melody, harmony, scales, chords, chord progressions, meter, rhythm, phrasing, & form need each other in order to make musical sense.
You can’t hear what you don’t listen for, just as you can’t see something if your eyes are closed, are looking in the wrong direction, or are focused on the wrong thing.
There are as many ways to listen as there are ways to direct your attention.
You can focus on any aspects of the music: form, meter, phrase length, tonality, melody, harmony, bass line, stylistic elements, dynamics, articulations, etc.
The ultimate goal is to get the music into your ears, brains, eyes, and muscles.
Can you think of some others?
Associative Listening
Successful ear training is about associating sound-feelings with something you already know.
This “associative listening” is simple:
- Pay attention to some music and be receptive to its sound-feeling.
- Associate that sound-feeling with something that you already know and that will be useful in performance.
Comparative Listening
We humans do very few things in absolute terms. We perceive and conceive of most things in relative terms — bigger/smaller, louder/softer, faster/slower, and so on. “Big” and “loud” and “fast” depend on the context and our point of reference. The lesson here is this: We learn to distinguish things from each other by sensing, perceiving, conceiving, and understanding how they are different. In music, comparative listening is listening to the differences between sounds and is an extremely important aspect of ear training. For example, the sound/feeling of a major scale is not fully appreciated until is is played side-by-side with a minor scale and vice versa.
Melody & Harmony
It’s a huge mistake to think that melody is melody and harmony is harmony…
Melodic ear training is really a misnomer. Harmonic ear training is really a misnomer.
There are enough melodic elements in harmony and enough harmonic elements in melody to make it pointless to quibble about the distinctions.
Melody and harmony are just two different views of the same musical stuff, where melody describes the horizontal aspects of the music (things that occur in sequence) and harmony describes the vertical aspects (things that occur simultaneously).
Theory-Assisted Listening
Music theory, studied correctly, is an essential aid to ear training. Your knowledge of scales, solfege, chords, and chord progressions organizes your thinking about sound and allows you to make highly-educated guesses about which notes are being played.
The ultimate goal of ear training is to allow your mind’s ear to be the leader when you perform. text and being to ply like an artist, not a robot.
The Ear Training Process
Ear Training is the process of marrying [right-brain] experience with [left-brain] knowledge and develops as follows:
- Listen to a musical “something”.
- Be receptive to the sensory-emotional experience of that “something” in a way that discriminates it from other musical “somethings”.
- Associate or Compare that sensory-emotional experience (that we can never fully put into words) with your relevant existing knowledge. (scales, chords, chord progressions, Solfege, keyboard layout, or any other musical pattern).
learn more… Absolute & Relative Pitch
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