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 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, why that changed, and what might be lost when listening becomes passive.

These aren’t arguments to be won or opinions to defend. They’re observations - the kind that ask you to slow down and notice what’s already happening.

Listening isn’t neutral

I’ve been thinking a lot about listening lately, especially as I write and reflect on my upcoming book - Guitar as a Mirror: Reflections on Learning, Practice, and Play. (Coming 2026). Not as it relates to playing, practicing, gear, or technique. Simply listening.

Sound can fill a room without asking anything of us. Listening asks us to show up. It requires attention, patience, and a willingness to stay with something longer than is immediately comfortable. This is where listening becomes a relationship, not a backdrop.

We like to tell ourselves that music taste is purely subjective - just preference. That it doesn’t say anything meaningful about who we are or how we engage with the world. It’s a polite idea, and it often keeps the peace - but I don’t think it’s true. Music taste doesn’t tell you everything about a person, but it does reflect how they relate to complexity, time, and emotion. And in that sense, listening is never neutral.

Taste is cultivated, not discovered

One of the most misleading ideas in modern culture is that taste is innate. That you either “get” certain music or you don’t. That some people are just wired for complexity and others aren’t. In reality, listening is a learned skill. Hearing harmony move, tracking rhythmic tension, following long-form structure, sitting with unresolved emotion. These aren’t instincts - they’re perceptual muscles. And like any muscle, if you don’t train them, they atrophy.

When someone says they find certain music boring, confusing, or exhausting, what they’re often expressing isn’t a judgment of quality - it’s a limit of exposure. You can’t enjoy what you haven’t learned how to hear yet. That’s not a personal failure, it’s a cultural one.

The disappearance of deep listening

Something shifted over the last few decades, and it wasn’t just the sound of the music. It was the assumption behind it. Music used to assume attention, where now it assumes distraction. Most people don’t sit and listen anymore. Music plays while we drive, scroll, work out, clean, or fill silence. It’s rarely the primary activity, and that changes the relationship entirely.

When music becomes background, it stops asking anything of us. It doesn’t challenge, it doesn’t stretch time, or demand patience. It simply occupies space. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that , but when it becomes the dominant mode of engagement, something important gets lost. Listening turns into consumption.

Beyond music

Here’s the part that’s harder to ignore: The skills required for deep listening - attention, patience, tolerance for ambiguity - are the same skills required for meaningful learning, emotional maturity, and self-reflection. When we train ourselves only for immediacy, we become uncomfortable with anything that unfolds slowly. We expect instant resolution, we confuse familiarity with quality, and we equate ease with value.

Music becomes one of the first places this shows up, but it doesn’t stay there. How we listen to music mirrors how we listen to each other. How long we’re willing to stay with discomfort. How quickly we need to be reassured. How much complexity we can tolerate before we check out. That’s a big claim, I know. I’m not asking you to agree with it yet, just notice it.

Listening as Practice

This is where guitar - and music more broadly - becomes a mirror. When you practice an instrument sincerely, you’re not just learning notes. You’re learning how to pay attention, how to slow time down, how to hear detail, how to sit with frustration without immediately escaping it.

Listening works the same way. You don’t stumble into deeper listening accidentally. You practice it, you choose it, you develop it. And once you do, you can’t unhear what you’ve learned to hear.

I’m not arguing that everyone should like the same music, that’s not the point. The point is that listening shapes us, whether we’re aware of it or not. And in a culture that increasingly rewards speed, simplicity, and constant replacement, it’s worth asking what kind of listeners we’re becoming.

In the next part, I want to look at how this shift didn’t just change listeners - it reshaped the music itself. For now, sit with the idea that listening is an active choice, and that choice matters more than we tend to admit.

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

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