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Listening to Discover

Teach yourself and your students to ask, “What am I hearing that I don’t yet have a name for?” This is skill that is larger than music.

I sing when I drive to help me focus. When my family is in the car with me, I keep the music and my voice low enough so they aren’t bombarded with my musical tastes, which can be more eclectic than theirs.

On one particular drive, the volume was low, the song familiar. I knew where it was going, and my voice went there ahead of it with the confidence of a man who had not yet been presented with evidence.

Then I turned the radio up.

I was in the wrong key. Not a little off, not picking at a stray harmony — wrong enough that I briefly wondered if someone had re-released a song that I’d known for decades. They hadn’t. My stereo worked fine. My voice had built a perfectly serviceable version of the song from incomplete information, and it wasn’t eager to update itself now that better evidence had arrived.

If you’ve ever heard a song from another room and started singing along, then entered the room to discover the music was somewhere else entirely pitch-wise, you’ve run a version of this experiment too. We usually treat it as peculiar, if we think of it at all, or a minor failure of the ear.

I think it shows how hearing actually works.

What we actually “hear”

We talk about sound like a package in the mail: The musicians record it, the PA speakers deliver it, our ears receive it undamaged. If the equipment works, everyone gets the same package.

That would be nice if it were true … but it’s not.

Let’s start with the wall. Hearing a song through a wall never sounds like a song. It a bass line, a kick drum and evidence that someone nearby is having a better evening than you are. But a wall isn’t a volume knob — it’s a filter that blocks high frequencies far more than low ones. In the simplest model, what acousticians call a “simple solid partition,” every doubling of frequency costs about six decibels, but real walls are messier.[1] Distance, reflections and the shape of the room alter what reaches us. So, by the time music reaches you through a wall, across a parking lot at a festival or out of a phone at the bottom of your gym bag, the top end of it has largely been eaten.

The ear adds another layer of editing. Equal-loudness research, beginning with Harvey Fletcher and Wilden Munson in the 1930s (and refined many times since), shows that our sensitivity to frequency changes with volume. In the modern ISO 226 standard, equal-loudness contours show that bass and the highest frequencies must be louder than much of the middle before we perceive them as equally loud. Turning up the radio doesn’t just make it louder, it changes which parts of the music you can actually hear.[2]

child holding their hands over their ears

Michael K. McBeath and John G. Neuhoff found something stranger, publishing a study in 2002 with a title I love, “The Doppler Effect Is Not What You Think It Is,” which showed that under controlled conditions, a continuous change in loudness alone can bias perceived pitch by almost a full octave.[3] This doesn’t mean louder music sounds higher, and it doesn’t prove what happened in my car. What it shows is narrower and still remarkable: Your auditory system doesn’t judge pitch in isolation. Loudness leaks into it.

Memory also supplies confidence. Daniel Levitin found that people without formal absolute-pitch training often sang familiar recordings surprisingly close to their original keys.[4] Surprisingly close, however, leaves room for a music teacher driving home to be impressively wrong.

What interests me now isn’t the key I blundered. It is that the version inside my head felt complete until the recording became loud enough to contradict it.

We do not hear sound in the abstract. We hear sound from somewhere. We hear it through walls, from particular seats, at particular volumes, filtered through expectations already standing by to help the brain reassemble the parts into a whole.

The plank and the wheel

Imagine a plank fixed across train tracks. From the plank’s position, the world is a series of wheels arriving and departing, each one a distinct event. Now ride one of the wheels instead, and the world becomes a continuous surface passing underneath, interrupted by planks.

Same train, same afternoon. Two accounts, and both are correct.

I learned to think in this way from a philosophy professor I had in college who spent much of the semester on logicians Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He once put a table in the middle of the room and asked us whether the table seen from one side was, in any meaningful sense, the same table seen from the other side of the room. Classmates found this either profound or infuriating, and I was not always in the profound camp. It took me about 20 years and a car radio to understand why this professor bothered with this lesson.

Two people at a concert don’t hear the same concert. One is under a balcony. The other is near a subwoofer. Both receive something real, but neither receives the whole event. Imagine the premiere of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.” Where could anyone have sat to hear all of that equally?

hand holding pencil and drawing a straight line

We drew the line

Here I want to tread mindfully — this argument gets misused constantly, often when someone tries to sound profound at the expense of a perfectly good discipline.

Music theory is one of humanity’s great acts of noticing. People heard relationships between tones, made distinctions and built systems for remembering them. Note names, staffs, clefs, meters, scales and harmonic analyses let ideas cross centuries. I teach these tools because they are powerful and I want students to have more language, not less.

I also want them to remember that it was people who made the tools.

During the Ming Dynasty in China, Zhu Zaiyu precisely calculated 12-tone equal temperaments in 1584. Not long afterward, Simon Stevin pursued the same mathematical problem in the Netherlands. A century later, Andreas Werckmeister spread unavoidable-pitch tuning challenges unevenly across the keyboard, making every key usable without spacing all 12 notes equally. These three system-builders approached related questions in different settings, not as one neat line of progress.[5]

We drew the line. The line is excellent. Trouble begins when a successful description of something starts pretending to be the thing it’s describing.

That distinction is important in a classroom. A student can learn very quickly that the notes on the page are the music, and anything between them is a mistake. The page may seem indispensable, but it is just a map. It can guide you beautifully while leaving out the temperature, the smell of the air and the hill that felt much steeper than it looked.

The blue note offers another example. It’s tempting to say that the blues introduced pitches that didn’t exist in Western music, but that’s not quite true. Western classical performance has never been entirely fixed-pitch. Singers and string players continuously adjust intonation in ways the notes on the page cannot fully specify. The more accurate version: Our notation makes some pitch relationships far easier to write down than others, which quietly teaches us the difficult ones are decoration, not content. Nobody on a porch in the Mississippi Delta waited for a theorist to authorize that bent third. They played it, and theory caught up later.[6]

Oral traditions have theory. They may store and transmit it in practice, memory, community and the body instead of placing all of it on a page.[7]

photo of spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Perseus taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — *Spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Perseus taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.*

The grandest example of this isn’t even on Earth. In 2003, Andrew Fabian’s team reported that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory had picked up ripples in the hot gas of the Perseus galaxy cluster, generated by the supermassive black hole at its center and interpreted as immense sound waves. Translated to a pitch, the waves corresponded to roughly a B-flat (about 57 octaves below middle C) estimated to have continued for roughly 2.5 billion years, offsetting the cluster’s radiative cooling.[8]

The black hole wasn’t sitting at a cosmic piano. “B-flat” is simply the nearest label we have after translating an immense physical event into our musical system.

The label helps us imagine it, but the label is not the event.

The question before the answer

I have come to think of musical listening through three questions.

“Can I play (or sing, or whistle) what I hear?” This is listening to reproduce. It is essential. Musicians match pitch, copy rhythms and learn how sound becomes action.
“Can I explain what I hear?” This is listening to understand. Theory gives us shared language for the chord that aches, the rhythm that leans forward or the melody that refuses to settle.
“What am I hearing that I don’t yet have a name for?” This is listening to discover.

The first two questions are rewarded with an answer. The third asks a student to stay with uncertainty without treating it as failure, which is a skill that is larger than music. Education often presents knowledge as a tidy exchange: The teacher owns the name, the student receives it and the matter is settled. This is efficient. Unfortunately, it can also teach students that anything they cannot name must not be worth noticing.

I see the opposite happen when a student hears tension in a chord and calls it “crunchy,” or when another says that it sounds like someone started a sentence and left. Those descriptions are not substitutes for musical vocabulary. They’re evidence that students noticed something before I supplied an approved answer. I teach the term afterward — and now the word has somewhere to land.

Noticing came first for every theorist who ever lived. It must come first for students, too. Someone hears a relationship, becomes aware of a pattern and cares enough to point it out.

Humility in Musical Knowledge

I was badly out of key in the car. I wasn’t worried what my family thought of my singing, and I would like my students to become comfortable being sonically wrong in exactly the same way. My mistake did not mean I had failed to hear. It meant the recording contained more than the version I had constructed from memory, and a quiet signal. Turning up the volume did not humiliate my first understanding, it enlarged it.

This is the humility I want musical knowledge to produce. The more accurately we can describe what we hear, the more capable we should become of suspecting that there is still something else there.

Sometimes a student hears it before I do. When this happens, the best answer a teacher may give is, “I don’t know what to call that yet. Let me listen again.”

I don’t want students to leave my room suspicious of theory. I want them suspicious of the exact moment any theory claims there’s nothing new left to hear.