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Learning to Listen: Neurological Evidence

Neurological evidence indicates we not only learn to listen, but actually tune our inner ear response based on neural feedback from the brain. We literally are able to actively tune our own hearing.  

When we listen for a flute for example, this is more than a conscious decision to focus on the flute. This creates neural impulses that actively tune ear cells to better hear the flute.  

This whole video is fascinating, but I want to get you hooked right away so check this out:  
https://youtu.be/SuSGN8yVrcU?t=1340

“Selectively changing what we’re listening to in response to the content. Literally reaching out to listen for things.”


Here’s another good one. Everyone can hear subtle details about five times as good as predicted by modeling. Some of us however can hear 50 times as good. The difference? Years spent learning to listen closely! https://youtu.be/SuSGN8yVrcU?t=1956

Learning to play music really does help improve your listening.  

This video is chock full of neurphysiological evidence that by studying, learning and practice you can develop the listening skills to hear things you literally could not hear before. Our hearing evolved millennia before we invented music. We are only just now beginning to scratch at the potential evolution has bestowed on us.


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danager's avatar
danager
954 posts
 
No worries
You could also try

Mare Nostrum
Paolo Fresu / Richard Galliano / Jan Lundgren

Richard Galliano brings it

frogman
7,457 posts
 
**** The question becomes, how does an audiophile who is not a musician, or who has no musical training, study, learn and practice his/her listening skills other than the ideas offered in this thread? ****

- A great place to start is reading these two books by two of the greatest musicians that have ever lived. There are others, but these do a particularly good job of being accessible to the non-musician.

“What To Listen For In Music” by Aaron Copland

”The Joy Of Music” by Leonard Bernstein

- Take a music appreciation course at the local college.

- On an even more immediate level, accept the fact that the sound of live music (preferably acoustic) is a great and ultimately the only true reference by which to judge how close our components get to true “accuracy” (probably the most misused term in audiophile-speak). Of course, this presumes that the audiophile seeks true accuracy and not just a preferred tonal signature. Additionally, abandon the idea (and this goes to the previously mentioned “message”) that tonal “accuracy” is the only important consideration when judging a component. In audiophile discussions seldom is anything other than tonality (frequency response signature) even discussed.  Soundstaging, as fun as it is, has little to do with the music. 

As a result of the record/playback process music suffers just as much distortion of one kind or another in the domain of rhythmic expression as it does in the domain of timbre/tonality. Only by attending live performances (preferably acoustic) can a listener fully learn to identify just how far our playback gear distorts the amazing rhythmic and dynamic immediacy and nuance of live music. This way we can identify why some gear sounds more rhythmically alive than others and why some sounds rhythmically dead. Phrasing has everything to do with rhythm and rhythm/timing is were most of the music of a performance is found. When we open our minds up to these possibilities we learn to be more discerning of both musical performance details and the performance of our gear.
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,101 posts
 
As a result of the record/playback process music suffers just as much distortion of one kind or another in the domain of rhythmic expression as it does in the domain of timbre/tonality. Only by attending live performances (preferably acoustic) can a listener fully learn to identify just how far our playback gear distorts the amazing rhythmic and dynamic immediacy and nuance of live music. This way we can identify why some gear sounds more rhythmically alive than others and why some sounds rhythmically dead. Phrasing has everything to do with rhythm and rhythm/timing is were most of the music of a performance is found. When we open our minds up to these possibilities we learn to be more discerning of both musical performance details and the performance of our gear.
Very important remarks....

My own experience about why some gear sounds with a rythmic expression which is sometimes dead is linked to the acoustic control (or the lack of) of the speakers/room... Among the 3 embeddings factors , acoustic is key....

These very subtle dynamics of expression IS music for a musician, and like say frogman , it is where the genius of an interpretation lives...

Like the humor of some musician and frogman put it: " Nobody ever gets fired for having a bad sound".... But music is more than good sound and audiophile experience is more than good gear sound ...

The "musical timbre phenomena" is the sums of tone harmonic body and envelope with this subtle dynamic gesture of the musician lost for the listener when acoustic of his speakers/ room is uncontrolled ....

Then before listening to gear we must know how to listen to music played by a musician, and non amplified one....To sensitize ourself with what is music essence....Music has begun with a body gesture million year ago from a mother to his child....The first musician is perhaps a mother moving his body and/or his tongue in synch with the child body....




«Music before being a sound, or a tone, is a gesture of the body»-Anonymus Smith

«Do you mean listening music and learning to listen is moving my body?»-Groucho Marx in a tango school 🤓

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