Journal · On Listening
Hearing, and Listening
They are not the same thing — and the gap between them is where the music lives.
Music is sound, so of course we hear it. But hearing and listening are two different acts — and almost everything that matters happens in the difference.
Hearing is passive. There is no intention behind it. You walk down a street and you hear the traffic while your mind is somewhere else entirely — turning over a conversation, planning the evening, anywhere but the street. The acoustic information arrives at your brain exactly as it should. Your attention is just not there to meet it. That is hearing.
Listening is active. You take your attention and you place it, deliberately, on the sound. Nothing about your ears changes — the change is entirely a matter of where you have decided to be. It sounds like a small distinction. It is not. It is one of the most important things a musician ever learns, and most never name it.
Start with yourself. When you practise, listen to the quality of what you are actually producing — not the idea of it in your head, but the real sound leaving the drum. Is the dom truly clean and consistent, or are you only assuming it is? Are your ghost notes even and flowing, or are some of them swallowed? You cannot fix what you have not heard, and you will not hear it while your attention is on the next bar, or on how you look, or on whether you are getting it right.
Listening pulls you in close. It collapses the distance between you and the instrument until there is nothing between your attention and the sound. That closeness is where real practice happens. Everything else is just repetition with your mind away from home.
And then there are other people. The moment you play with others, listening stops being a refinement and becomes the whole game. Because now listening does something almost magical: it takes your attention out of yourself — out of the endless inner commentary — and puts it in the room, in the moment, in the hands of the people you are playing with.
When you genuinely listen to the musicians around you, you groove harder. You become more sensitive in the way you accompany them. You react in real time instead of running your own pre-decided part over the top of theirs. You become more present, more expressive, more dynamic — and, strangely, far more relaxed. Your playing comes alive, because it is finally answering something outside of you instead of talking only to itself.
Listening takes your attention out of yourself — and out of yourself is exactly where the music is.
So try this. The next time you sit down to play with people — a jam with friends, a rehearsal with a band — test your listening the way you would test any other skill. Consciously move your attention from one musician to the next. Spend a while with the oud player and try not to lose a single note of what they are doing. Then move to the pianist and really follow the chords, as though those chords were the only thing in the world that mattered. Then move again.
You will be surprised by two things. The first is how difficult this is — how quickly your attention slides off the other player and back onto yourself. The second is how completely different the music feels when you manage to hold it there. You are no longer performing near other people. You are playing with them.
Here is a test that comes built in. If you find you cannot hear the others well — good. That is information. Play lower. When you are not amplified, your volume should always be quiet enough that you can hear every single instrument in the room. If you can’t, you are too loud. It is one of the clearest rules I know, and it almost never fails: the player who cannot hear the room is the player drowning it.
None of this is effortless, and I want to be honest about why. Your brain does not want to give its attention away. It will keep trying to pull you back inside with its endless monologue about everything and nothing — what just happened, what comes next, how you sound. That pull never fully stops. The work is simply to notice it, and, again and again, to turn your attention back outward — to the drum, to the room, to the people making music with you. That turn, repeated, is what makes a musician present. And presence is the thing everyone can feel.
Hearing happens to you. Listening is a choice you make — outward.
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