Your goal is to become better and better at making that mental switch from “hearing” to “listening” any time you want, and for anything you want. See if you can follow that one thing throughout the song. I want you to very deliberately pick out a specific instrument or vocal part to focus on and “listen” to it. I want you to play that song, but this time I want you to intentionally listen very closely to everything that’s happening. Here’s what I’d like you to do! The Exercise:įind your favorite song-one you’ve heard a hundred times and really enjoy. “He’s still out there, he’s ok” you think, then you simply switch your attention back to the TV show you were listening to and the children outside go back to being background noise.Īmazing when you pay attention to it, isn’t it? But these examples prove that most all of us have this ability and it can be developed quite strongly by doing a very simple exercise when you’re playing music. A couple of minutes later you hear him laugh. So now you shift your focus away from the TV towards the sounds coming from outside, and you begin to listen for your child’s voice. Your attention-your focus- is on the tv show you’re watching.īut then after about a half-hour or so you realize you haven’t heard your child’s voice out there for a while. So they become part of the background noise. Again, you can hear them but you aren’t listening to them. Maybe you’re watching TV inside, but you can hear all of their voices collectively in the background playing, laughing and talking. Imagine a group of children outside playing. You just instantly switched from hearing the sound to listening to it.Īnother example I like to give when I’m teaching this relates much more to listening to a song and picking out one particular thing to focus on. It didn’t get any louder, but you can hear it much more distinctly now simply because you’ve assigned much more value to it. However if you were to-without turning your head away from the screen- stop reading and focus on one of those sounds, then everything changes. You can hear them, but you’re not listening to them. As you’re reading this article right now there are several sounds happening in the room. Basically, the difference between hearing and listening is the value you’re assigning to it. You may have seen me talk about the difference between listening and hearing a few times before, but let’s review that really quickly before I explain this little exercise. But if you make a simple adjustment to the way you’re listening- more specifically “how” you’re listening- you’ll find that you can train yourself to pull almost any part of a song right to the front of the mix, so you year that part or that instrument more than anything else going on. We all tend to listen to music in it’s totality, or to focus primarily on what or who is out front. It’s not something you pay attention to when you listen to music. Most people don’t know how to do this simply because it’s not something they practice doing regularly. It may sound almost impossible at first, but most people have the ability to do that very thing. So, if you’re an Alto, how can you listen to a song and be expected to hear your part out of all that stuff going on? There’s the music, there’s the leader, there’s all the other voices/ parts. Many people have a very tough time hearing their part in the middle of everything else that is going on in the song. The music director expects you not only to listen to and become familiar with the words, but your part in the harmony as well. So we’re toe-tapping, nodding our heads to the beat and just enjoying the music, not really getting anything from the song that will help prepare us for rehearsal. Many people take the cd home and listen to the selections, but they listen to them the way they listen to everything else. What they expect, of course, is that you’ll listen to the song and be familiar with it by rehearsal time, so that the learning process will go faster.īut the truth is, most people don’t really know how to listen to a song that way. Many times the choir director or music director will pass out copies of the song(s) to be learned in advance of rehearsal. Although it’s not true of all church music departments, many Gospel music ministry departments learn material almost entirely by ear.
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