1. Hello darkness...
“I do believe in listening to music in the dark,” declares Crum. “It’s hugely impactful. There are some subtleties you can only hear when you take away another sense.”
The trouble is our brains are just too good, and so with sight and our other faculties in play we’re not hearing a pure sound, but what our brains think we should be hearing after subconsciously making sense of everything else around us.
“Our senses are constantly interacting in ways that make us extremely effective in the world despite all the noise and other incongruous stimuli that would overwhelm us. Your brain is really good at making sure there are things you don’t hear sometimes,” explains Crum.
“But it comes at a price sometimes, and we lose the ability to hear fine subtlety and nuance. Listening in the dark stops your brain doing what it naturally wants to do, interact with your other senses, and focuses your attention on just the one sense. So you can hear a richness that you would otherwise not pick up on.
When I’m playing the violin I often practice in the dark, it’s the only way if you want to hear acoustics around you more effectively, it enables you to hear things you otherwise wouldn’t. You’re experiencing the audio world more as it
actually is, which is called veridical. You’re perceptually experiencing the physical world one to one.”
Good work Gideon!
2. Train your brain
“You can absolutely train yourself to hear more,” says Crum. “Attention is one very important feature. Musicians are exceptional at modulating their attention, it’s like a spotlight, they can zoom in on one element which causes an accentuation and hyper-sensitivity of certain elements in that scene causing their other senses to fade into the background. A very refined attentional control allows them to zoom in and out of what they’re experiencing. It’s a big part of ear training in most musical conservatories.”
If you want to develop similar skills yourself you have to focus.
“Your brain wants to re-organise information and it’s hard to override the natural organisation it wants to make of information from the world around it, but attention is a very powerful tool,” says Crum.
“If you are tracking single elements in a complex piece that can be very powerful, and it can help you consciously modulate your attention from a micro to a macro level. For a genre like EDM that could be very powerful experience. I’m actually a big advocate of listening to the same thing over and over because familiarity enables you to modulate, so you can use that music as a training ground.”
To build your mental gym a copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon
may come in handy.
“One thing I do with my students in a perception class is use Pink Floyd, because they have an innate understanding of how the brain will perceive information and that’s the thing you’re trying to control,” suggest Crum, introducing her audio push-up regime.
“Take a track like Money, it has all these elements that don’t start out as a sequence and you don’t start grouping them together until they go faster and faster and then form rhythmical structures. You can try to track one of these elements by focusing on it. Then if you drop your attention and listen to the track holistically, then try to focus again.
It would be really hard to hear that single element if you haven’t focused on it from the start, but if we have a cue in our brain for what we’re looking for then our sensitivity is greatly heightened. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing you want to try to train if you want to hear more. You can find these elements in so much music now, so you can have a much richer interaction with the sounds you’re listening to.”
