How to Listen to Music?

Before I go about telling you what kind of music to listen to, I think I should go over effective listening methods. These are just methods because everyone listens to music differently, so, instead of me telling you exactly how to listen, I am going to attempt to give you the tools to create your own way of listening. I am also just going to ignore passive listening in this post. 

The first thing you should do is set up some time to listen to music, five minutes, ten minutes, it doesn't matter, but make sure a block of time is set. I like to listen to music when I am doing work, driving, and in between classes (as well as many other times). If you think you are up to it, multi tasking music and homework is a lot of fun and sometimes even pushes me to do more work. At the same time, if I get lost in a song, I may forget about work for five minutes.

So you picked a time to listen to music. Whats next? Picking a song/album/live show/etc. Definitely go and do that. But if you can wait under a week I will also go into picking music for particular moods and such. For now, listen to The Meters (you don't have to, but just do it anyway).

Ok, so you plugged in your speakers/headphones/brain to your computer/cd player/record player/tape deck/eight track, you did plug something in right? Because you are not allowed to use your computer speakers! They sound awful. At this point you can finally hit the play button, aren't you so excited?!

So you are hearing something. I suggest asking yourself some questions at this point. How fast or slow is it? What does the rhythm feel like? What is the melody? What is the mood of the song like? How are the instruments interacting? How does the music make me feel? Are there repeating musical motifs? What is the energy of the song like? How does the song make me feel? What is it making me think about?

Basically your goal is to immerse yourself in the tune/tunes. Get lost, close your eyes, tap your feet. And don't worry if you catch your self thinking about something else and forgetting about the music. Music is supposed to make you think. Just get back to the music and try to figure out why it made you think that.

For your first assignment, I would think about where you are going to get future recommended listenings. Research Spotify, Grooveshark (as I showed you earlier), LastFm, iTunes, it doesn't really matter, but YouTube doesn't always have the best quality recordings, they do have really good videos however.

First recommended listening: Ecclusiastics By Charles Mingus