Notes on listening as a practice

I worked in sound for ten years before I realised I had never actually listened to anything. This is the kind of sentence that sounds dramatic and isn't. I had heard plenty. I had monitored frequencies, balanced levels, equalised vocals. I had spent thousands of hours with audio inputs in front of me. None of this is listening.

I learned the difference, the way I have learned most useful things, by accident — when I quit the job, moved to Reykjavik, and spent a winter mostly indoors not listening to anything in particular. My ears, denied their usual work, started to do something else.

What "hearing" is doing

Hearing is functional. The brain receives auditory input and immediately processes it: is this a threat? is this familiar? is this useful? The actual sound disappears almost immediately into a category. You can hear someone say your name without ever really hearing the sound; you go straight from the syllables to the recognition.

Most of what we call "listening to music" or "listening to a podcast" is this kind of hearing. The audio is input; the input is being processed; the processing is what we remember, not the audio itself. The audio, in some real sense, never arrived.

What "listening" is doing

Listening, as I have come to understand it, is keeping the auditory input in the foreground of attention without letting it collapse into categories. You hear the kettle and let it stay the sound of a kettle, not "the kettle is on," not "I should make tea," not "I forgot about that meeting." The sound itself, in its specific texture, for the few seconds it lasts.

This is hard. Almost impossibly hard, the first time. The mind wants to categorise immediately. The practice of listening is the practice of refusing to, for a little longer than the mind wants.

The simplest exercise

Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes. For five minutes, listen to whatever sounds are arriving — the heating system, the building creaking, a bird somewhere, the small sound of your own breathing. Don't categorise. Don't think about what they mean or whether you should do something about them. Just keep the sounds in the foreground.

When you find yourself thinking about a sound rather than hearing it, gently come back to the sound. The coming back is the practice.

Five minutes, daily, for two weeks. That is the whole assignment.

What changes

What changes, slowly, is the texture of the world. Sounds you have been hearing without noticing for years become available to you. The specific note your kettle makes when it boils. The way the refrigerator's hum changes pitch when the compressor cycles. The fact that your radiator has a small irregular tick.

None of this is useful. None of it is going to make you more productive. What it gives back is something quieter: a richer relationship with the place you live, and an attention muscle that turns out to work in places that have nothing to do with sound.

The attention you bring to small sounds becomes the attention you bring to small sensations, small choices, small moments.

If you want to try this

Don't put on a recording of forest sounds. Don't use an app. Don't listen to "ambient music." Those are not the practice; they are sound used as wallpaper. The practice is to listen to the room you are already in. Whatever sounds it is making, those are the sounds.

The room you live in has been speaking to you for years. You might find that you have not been there for it. Five minutes a day, with eyes closed, can change this.

Next: a small inventory of the quietest sounds in my own flat, which I started making a year ago and have not finished.