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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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Showing 5 responses by nonoise

nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,577 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? ****
We enter this world with a super refined gift of a mechanism that we learn to ascribe words, definitions and understandings of what it is we hear. By the time we're 5 yrs old, some of us are using adult grammar, fully understanding it, for crying out loud.

Having a hobby which involves hearing is simply a plus and how we refine it is innate (you know, born with it). The fact that there's a science to it only validates it. 

I've never played French Horn or slept at a Holiday Inn but I've refined my hearing more than the average bear and don't require a PA system to properly ascertain what I hear. Like I said, it's innate, as is the refining process. Some are better at it than others but it's safe to say, most here get it, and they're not musicians. 

All the best,
Nonoise

nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,577 posts
 
Like the old saying, A plumbers house always leaks. 


nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,577 posts
 
Nice link on David Byrne. Makes me wonder if our use of gear to listen to music is a kind of spandrel of it's own: an unintended outcome of our thirst for listening that's now an expensive and consuming hobby.

All the best,
Nonoise
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,577 posts
 
winnaardt,
We have a lot in common in the way we listen to music. I love picking out and following lines of different instruments and singers and use that skill to analyze my playback gear. 

The more I can hear into a piece and pick something to follow, successfully, is my way of judging the ability to separate notes and themes. If that is successful, then lots of other parameters can be more easily met and judged. So the easier it is to judge begets ease of listening which begets satisfaction.

All the best,
Nonoise
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,577 posts
 
When I clicked on the link I saw I was more than 20 minutes into it from a previous viewing. Just forgot about it. Great stuff that we've used to argue to naysayers that this is all a learned and perfected talent just like any other sense.

Once honed, our listening abilities know what and when to listen for when evaluating music, especially familiar music, for comparing product.

All the best,
Nonoise
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