Week 1 - The difference between hearing and listening
The title immediately grabbed my attention; I have always been fascinated by sound and the intricacies of it. The first thing in Pauline’s speech is a reverberation impulse response, one of the most praised audio effects throughout the history of recorded music. It injects life into any dull recording, makes one believe the recorded sounds are real and gives a sense of space. As Pauline put it, we musicians indeed find reverb fascinating. It adds so much depth to the sound of an instrument that some consider it cheating.
What does it mean to hear? When vibrations of air molecules reach our ears, we hear them given that they are within the human hearing range. Listening; however, is a conscious act performed by the brain. In the episode titled “What Does Music Mean” from the television series “Young People’s Concerts”, American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein states that on its own musical notes have no meaning, they are no different to any other sound found in nature, once we place those notes in a planned order our brain can discern the intervals between them and we then perceive that as music. Our brain calculates the ratio between the notes in real time and associates them with senses. Although defining listening is a challenge, we may consider this as a partial explanation to what happens when we listen. And as stated by Pauline, the process of listening depends on accumulated experiences with sound, this then provides us with an explanation to why a certain piece can sound beautiful to one and utter ear rape to another. Our experience certainly does play a role in listening, a common instance is when someone despises a music in their first listen but after they hear it on multiple occasions, experiences are attached to the notes and the intervals, and it becomes their favorite piece.
Each space has a unique sound of its own. Every single object inside a room affects soundwaves generated in that room, a fully packed venue sounds massively different to an empty one even if all the other variables are set equal. Musicians are affected by this all the time; the way a musician performs varies depending on the acoustics of a venue or a room.
When Pauline talks about the act of deep listening and being aware of our surroundings she mentions complexity and out of ordinary understanding. In an age of constant information bombardment and short attention spans, it is rare to find courage to engage in deep listening. It's hard to find someone (whose profession isn't related to sound) sitting down and listening to a silent empty room; it can even feel stressful and nerve-racking to some.
Being able to target a sound or sequence of sounds can sound easy but it takes effort. I can think of a friend who could not identify the bass line of a song. Then one evening after consuming some Marijuana, he was able to identify what the bass player was playing. I don’t mean to suggest that drugs can help you focus, but something had happened in his brain and it had helped him focus on a specific range of frequencies.
The fact that we hear is astonishing, I fear the day that I will lose my hearing. As it turns out once those cells inside our ears die, they are not being replaced. I obsessively take hearing tests and gauge which frequency is the highest I can hear, and I am not happy about the results. Years of constant exposure to loud music has done the damage. I would like to end with a quote from the video which I aspire to apply to my life as well:
“My practice is to listen to everything all the time and remind myself when I am not listening.”
— Nima Niazi