How to Listen to Music

Use music to deepen emotional awareness and receptivity

Photo by Stephen Harlan on Unsplash

I know the title sounds ambitious and obnoxious, but bear with me a little, especially if you are into music. I am not going to tell you how you should listen to your regular daily music. What I am going to offer is an approach to music and a practice that will help you connect better with your emotions and intuition, as I said, through music.

I notice that many people listen to music somehow with their minds, or their intellect, if you will, rather than open themselves up to the whole effect and experience of it. I also think that many have gotten used to tolerating music rather than truly and genuinely enjoying it, or looking for what they really enjoy instead of what is available, or what is just there, on TV or radio or whatever.

A side effect of this is to project myself and my current state onto music rather than experiencing its true and complete effect. A great example of this happens often in Turkish weddings when people dance collectively to music that is in fact quite sad — about grief and loss — because it is also rhythmic and played upbeat. I was also very surprised when German friends found the Greek song playing (Lizeta Kalimeri singing some Rebetico) somewhat whiny, while it sounded rather happy to me at the time.

As great as Lizeta Kalimeri — and the song — is, in the end they were right, and I was projecting a cultural memory and feelings around it — a calm and cool Mediterranean evening with friends, a bit of rakı, mosquitos— on the music, rather than taking it in as it was.

I listened to a lot of quite heavy and quite sad music when I was younger, again, projecting my inner states onto them. This didn’t mean that my experience was fake, and it worked for me to process my emotional states at the time. This must also be the reason why people keep reading Cioran after all (please let me know if there is any other).

However, that is not the most interesting — and I dare say, genuine — way of interacting with music. Good music can do much more than that. Music is — to me — one of the most effective art forms in terms of how it allows personal experience, as well as social meaning, to be communicated from person to person in ways language cannot.

Music is also one of the best vehicles we have in which emotions can be encoded to travel interpersonally. Literature, poetry, painting, and other art forms do that as well, though music is more immediate — in the moment — in its effect compared to these other art forms. Not better, just more infused into our experience of time, which brings direct immediacy.

In the 2002 movie Equilibrium, in which humans are forced to take a drug that suppresses their emotions, our main hero (Christian Bale) meets the depth of his capacity for feeling during the moments he gets to hear Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for the first time.

Remember it with me, if you like.

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What is art, really?

In *Being Given, philosopher Jean-Luc Marion develops and defends a way of approaching reality (reduction to givenness) for phenomenological inquiry. At one point, he applies his method to art (pp. 39- 53) and asks, what is given in the artwork? In other words: What is art really?* What is the one thing that is essential to describe what it is? What is the central element that, when you remove it, art loses its essence?

He takes a “generic” Dutch painting from the 17th century (without naming a specific one) and works with it for — what we experience as a reader — multiple pages of dense writing. The analysis is fascinating. The painting is a physical object, but its essence isn’t in its subsistence or physicality. It isn’t in its direct use function either (as in ready-to-hand), as it is “not a collection of colors really available here as an object; it is rather the visibility of what appears without however being objectified.”

The painting is not its physical substance, nor its usefulness. Yet it appears all the more. It doesn’t even remain within its frame but always sends to an elsewhere: “This is not a pipe!”

Marion finally turns to Cézanne, who says “The effect constitutes the painting; it unifies and concentrates it,” and “Every object (…) is a being endowed with a life of its own and which in consequence has an inevitable effect.”

Marion adopts this view and understands “effect” with all its multiplicity, as

“effect as the shock that the visible provokes, effect as the emotion that invades the one gazing, effect also as the indescribable combination of the tones and the lines that irreducibly individualize the spectacle.” — Jean-Luc Marion (Being Given)

For Marion, artwork cannot be reduced to its material components or practical function. It manifests through what it gives to perception, including its affective and bodily effects.

The essence of any artwork is its effect.

As simple as it sounds, this is a truly great insight to behold.

For the Dutch painting, Marion goes through elements and impressions of the painting, displaying a house and a servant, animals, and country objects, none of which are essential. Neither is the framed canvas, nor even the organization of the colors and forms.

Marion then finds an “ochre serenity” in the painting, which is what it gives besides as object and being, besides its real component parts. Its effect.

It isn’t the brush stroke; it is what it does to me.

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

Meditating with music

For music, this means that musical greatness isn’t really about its physical qualities alone; how the guitar is shredding, how good the singer is, how the drummer is grooving, or how perfect the pianist is playing. It is all of these together, but it is also neither one of them in particular, which — as nice as they are to ponder— can also distract from the essential thing: the overall effect the artwork on the body, understood completely; emotion and all other sensation, such as the excitement, sadness, insights, and some perhaps also manifesting physically in the stomach, on the neck, and so on.

So then, how do I make more of my music listening? How do I open myself better to the momentous and emotive effects of music, and learn a bit about myself and my emotions in the meantime?

The key to hear the artwork this way isn’t to interpret what the music is saying. It isn’t to think about it. It is better to just suspend any intellectual interpretation or effort.

The exercise I offer is simple: Just silence yourself — in all the ways possible — and let the music do its thing on you. You can call it a specific kind of meditation, perhaps, where we focus on the music rather than our breath.

Do not tap or sing along, which would imply adding something from yourself. We don’t want to project and have a mixture of ourselves and the artwork, but to silence ourselves and just let the artwork do the talking instead.

Sit with music passively and open yourself to it. First and foremost, focus on your emotions in relation to what is playing. What emotion or emotional state is the song offering? What is getting to you exactly? What does the song offer, or give?

Try to push all sound, all instrumentation to the background, as if you are hearing it with your peripheral hearing, and just focus on the emotional content of the song. What emotion is it communicating? How are you receiving it? What direct emotional changes is the music causing?

Don’t even try to name the emotion, just feel it.

No wandering thoughts. No distractions. Just the music washing over you.

Then, listen with your body and explore: is there a particular place in your body that seems to be responding to music? How is the emotion manifesting itself in your body? For instance, the 9th usually activates something in my chest and legs. Heavy music can also have interesting effects on the body; there are songs I feel in my entire upper body, including my head, face, stomach, and so on.

This doesn’t require listening to any particular kind of music. Use the music you already like, just experiencing it a little differently, or exploring deeper why you really enjoy this song in the first place.

After this, we can perhaps listen for descriptions of the effect of the song, analogous to Marion’s “ochre serenity,” such as “the curious anxiety of taking off for a long journey,” “a proud longing,” “a carefree and youthful joy,” and so on. Let us name if the music is leaving such an impression.

Nature and I

As you do this, you are just opening space for the music to show (give, for Marion) itself to you, rather than interfering in it with your current state, preconditions, expectations, assumptions, ideas, or theories.

Incidentally, what you are also doing by suspending these latter is taking a glimpse into the main phenomenological viewpoint. As described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, this is a vantage point in which I — temporarily — suspend my natural attitude, which is based on the assumption that Nature (and all its phenomena) is constituted outside of me and without me, without needing any of my presence.

Another element of the natural attitude is that I am a passive observer vis-a-vis Nature, and I am not necessary. Let us suspend this as well.

When both of these assertions are suspended, I get to see how Nature and I are in fact together and simultaneously creating reality. I participate in the process through which Nature appears, is experienced, and becomes intelligible.

Merleau-Ponty argues that our relation to the world is not of looking at an external object from a distance, and definitely not as “first a mind and secondarily a body” located in the world, but as a fully embodied being embedded in Nature, which makes perception a reciprocal and simultaneous constitution between perceiver and object, between Nature and Nature (read more here).

Suspending the ideas of world-in-itself and consciousness-in-itself opens one to allow and observe the correlation between mind and outside reality, the self and the world, that is, how the two constitute each other reciprocally. Reality forms consciousness, and consciousness reconstructs reality. It isn’t one or the other; it is both of these happening and working together at the same time.

The art of listening

From this perspective, we can understand better how Marion is listening to the givenness in the phenomenon, or what the phenomenon gives, in this case the painting: it isn’t just an object, it isn’t a tool, it isn’t just entertainment. It is the entirety of what it is doing to me, the whole of my body’s reactions to it in all its faculties and capacities; it is its effect.

After reading Marion, I began approaching art, and particularly music, differently. One thing that has been happening is the slow but sure elimination of sad and melancholic music from all my playlists. They are not all gone, but I will only take my favorites and nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary.

I also find that I am eliminating music that is very interesting but not very emotive from my life as well. Music that doesn’t give anything emotionally feels a bit empty, doesn’t it? By that, Animals as Leaders stays, but a lot of Megadeth, unfortunately, goes away.

This has a lot to do with Spinoza as well, which I defer to a rainier day.

If you can’t think of a song to practice, shuffle the playlist below and find more on my Spotify profile.

Please suggest your favorite songs and playlists in the comments.

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