Part 1 - Listening Isn't Neutral: on taste, attention, and the illusion of subjectivity

This is the first in a short three-part series exploring listening, not simply as a technical skill, but as a way of relating to music, attention, and ourselves. Each piece looks at a different layer of that relationship: how we listen, how that relationship has changed, and what might be lost when listening becomes increasingly passive. These aren’t arguments I’m interested in winning or opinions that need defending. They’re observations drawn from playing, teaching, and spending a life around music, offered as an invitation to notice what may already be happening, including in ourselves.

Listening Isn’t Neutral

I’ve been thinking a lot about listening lately, partly through the larger body of ideas I’ve been developing around Guitar as a Mirror, and partly because the longer I teach and play music, the more important listening seems to become. I don't mean listening as it relates to practicing, gear, technique, or even playing an instrument. I mean simply listening. Sound can fill a room without requiring much from us, but listening is different because it involves attention. We have to stay with something long enough to hear beyond the most immediate impression, allowing details, relationships, and sometimes entire pieces of music to reveal themselves gradually. This is where listening becomes less like a backdrop and more like a relationship.

We like to think of musical taste as purely subjective, a matter of preference that says very little about who we are or how we engage with the world. There is some truth in that, of course. Musical taste cannot tell us everything about a person, and liking complicated music certainly doesn't make someone complicated or interesting. But I don't think taste is entirely neutral either. What we choose to listen to, what holds our attention, what we find difficult, and what we're willing to spend time understanding can reveal something about our relationship with complexity, time, familiarity, and emotion. In that sense, how we listen may tell us as much as what we listen to.

Taste Is Cultivated, Not Discovered

One of the assumptions worth questioning is that musical taste simply appears fully formed, as though we either “get” certain music or we don't. My experience has been almost the opposite. Much of what I love most deeply today took time for me to hear. Harmony that once passed unnoticed became meaningful as my ears developed, rhythmic details became clearer through playing with other people, and longer musical forms became easier to follow once I learned how to stay with them instead of waiting for something immediately recognizable to happen. Listening develops through exposure, curiosity, and attention. That doesn't mean everyone who listens carefully will eventually enjoy the same music, nor should they. It means our first reaction isn't necessarily the limit of what we're capable of hearing. When someone finds unfamiliar music boring, confusing, or exhausting, the reaction may be completely genuine, but it doesn't necessarily tell us everything about the music. Sometimes it simply describes our relationship with it at that particular point in time. There is something encouraging about that because taste doesn't have to be a fixed identity. Our ears can change, and with them, our relationship to music can change too.

The Disappearance of Deep Listening

The way we encounter music has changed dramatically over the last few decades, and I don't think the difference is limited to formats, technology, or the music itself. Our expectations of attention have changed with them. Music now accompanies almost everything. We listen while driving, scrolling, exercising, cleaning, working, shopping, or simply filling the absence of sound. I do plenty of this myself, and there is nothing inherently wrong with music being part of another activity. Some of my favorite listening happens in exactly those situations. But something changes when background listening becomes our primary relationship with music. A piece that unfolds slowly asks something different from us when it is the only thing we're doing. Details that disappear beneath conversation become obvious, repetition feels different when we're actually following it, and silence becomes part of the music rather than empty space waiting for the next sound.

When our attention is divided, music can easily become another stream of material passing through the day. We still hear it and may even enjoy it, but we aren't necessarily spending much time with it. Listening can gradually become consumption without us ever deciding that it should, and I think that distinction is worth paying attention to.

Beyond Music

This is where the question becomes larger than music. The qualities involved in attentive listening, including patience, curiosity, and a willingness to remain with something we don't immediately understand, are useful far beyond a record or concert hall. They matter when we're learning, when we're trying to understand another person, and when we're examining our own reactions closely enough to recognize where they come from. If we become accustomed to immediate resolution, anything that unfolds slowly can start to feel unnecessarily difficult. Familiarity can begin masquerading as quality, while discomfort becomes a reason to move on rather than an invitation to become curious. Music is simply one place where we can observe this happening.

How long are we willing to stay with something before deciding what we think about it? What happens when we don't understand something immediately? Do we become curious, or do we reach for something more familiar? Those questions interest me far more than whether someone agrees with my taste in music, because the answers may reveal something about how we direct our attention elsewhere in our lives as well.

Listening as Practice

This is one of the places where the ideas behind Guitar as a Mirror extend beyond the guitar itself. An instrument gives us a remarkably direct way to observe our habits of attention because it continually reflects them back through sound. When we practice sincerely, we're learning much more than where the notes are. We learn to recognize tension, hear smaller differences, stay with frustration, notice when attention wanders, and return when it does.

Listening develops through many of the same experiences. We don't necessarily become more attentive listeners simply by hearing more music. Depth comes from how we engage with what we're hearing, whether we're willing to stay curious, return to something we didn't understand the first time, and occasionally give music our complete attention rather than asking it to accompany something else. Eventually we begin hearing things that were always present but previously escaped us. The music hasn't changed; our relationship with it has.

I'm not interested in arguing that everyone should appreciate the same music or that one kind of listening is somehow morally superior to another. I'm interested in the possibility that listening shapes us while we are shaping it, and that our habits of attention may influence far more than our playlists. In a culture increasingly organized around speed, immediacy, and an almost endless supply of things competing for our attention, it seems worth asking what kind of listeners those conditions are teaching us to become.

In the next part, I'll look at the other side of that relationship: how changing patterns of listening may have influenced the music being made for us to hear.

If this resonates, you're welcome to stay with the conversation.

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