Learning to Listen: Neurological Evidence

@tvad …could be that i got lucky…. A friend with a superb system circa 1983 or so…Infinity RS ( model down from IRS ), SOTA, Souther, Dynavector, CJ Premier… also a renowned music teacher in Mid Ohio..treated me to Mahler preconcert lecture / symphony in Cleveland …

Part of the lecture ( i may have inhaled ) focused on the selection of material for the death blows…. Leather over wood with a massive wood mallet ( think sledgehammer )

…the pre concert lecture…....

The message is that for musicians the most important considerations when judging excellence (or lack of) in a performance are rhythmic accuracy (timing) and pitch (intonation). Without those, good ensemble cohesion is impossible. When that cohesion is absent the musical message is lost.

Our brains definitely “fill in gaps” from data supplied by our ears, eyes, nose, skin, etc.

This is a long-established area of medical/psychiatric study.

I’m a magic enthusiast. Not a practicing magician (was when I was a kid), but someone who follows the art form, and is interested in the history and the how.

I recently read a book, “Sleights of Mind”, that examines how magic works from the perspective of neuroscience. One of the primary take-aways is that our brains fill in the blanks from what we see and hear during a trick, and that these blanks are filled in incorrectly. This is how a magician fools us. He/she manipulates a prop in a manner our brain believes it has seen before, placing a coin in a hand for example. Many of us have seen a trick like this...the magician repeats placing a coin into someone’s palm several times, then when he/she does it the fourth time the coin disappears. The magician does something with the coin that fourth time that our brain doesn’t process correctly. Our brain processes what it “thinks” our eyes have seen based on seeing the coin placed in a hand several times prior. Our brain fills in the blank, and misses the sleight of hand, even though our eyes have plainly seen the manipulation.

To me, it’s not hard to correlate this concept of filling-in-the-blanks to audio reproduction. Many of us know the sound of a live stand-up bass, a drum, a trumpet. When we hear a recording of an instrument, do our brains fill in the gaps of missing recorded information and make that recording sound more “real”? I’d say the answer must be yes. Musical memory, familiarity with sound(s), is part of listening whether passively or actively. I’m sure there are published studies about this.

Opus 3 depth of image LP

David Byrne from Talking Heads wrote a similar article for Smithsonian Magazine back in 2012.

Learning to play music really does help improve your listening.

Absolutely agree, and have written about this previously in a couple
Listening threads.

These steps have helped me:

1) Hearing live music. As an extension, being trained to play in an ensemble. Are either required? As @whart has written multiple times...no, but the skills can be applied to listening to a home audio system.

2) Listening to a familiar recording across multiple systems, sometimes with the guidance of the system’s owners to be made aware of elements/aspects in a system’s sound. I hate hearing the same recordings over and over, but the fact is the process is extremely helpful when learning to listen to a system, then later when evaluating changes to a system...or evaluating an unfamiliar system.

3) Related to above - listening to tracks on test LPs or CDs: Stereophile, XLO,etc. Why is this helpful in learning how to listen? Each recording on a test disc is provided because it offers an example (or examples) of a particular quality: human voice, piano, venue cues, image depth/width. Liner notes usually explain what to listen for in each. Very, very helpful in the process of learning how to listen.

4) Someone to guide (or teach) during a listening session, preferably in one’s own system so the sound characteristics are familiar. I had a manufacturer once come to my home to demonstrate a component. Toward the end of the demo, he swapped in some footers he liked to use. We also compared to footers I owned. He offered some observations that were quite helpful, and provided a lesson in listening.

Number 4 is important. In my life, when I didn’t understand something, or when I didn’t perceive something someone else perceived, it was always helpful for that person to explain in detail what they were perceiving, and guide me to it. Guide me toward how to do it. When a breakthrough occurred, it was a very exciting moment.