You can hear music but do you listen to the music you are hearing? Music appreciation music appreciation goes beyond hearing. I was taught this by my lecturer during my course a long time ago. To appreciate music, you must learn to listen to music. What? Yes, I was being taught that hearing and listening are two different things. I always think women have a better understanding of this concept. Hearing is one of our senses perceiving sound coming out of someone’s mouth, or speakers, or musical instrument in the case of music. Our voice is also a musical instrument. Listening is the conscious process to understand or better understand what is being heard by our sense of hearing. It is a process which involves the mind. To fully appreciate a piece of music is to really listen to it. Such simple observation ya.
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Listen to music and appreciating it. Listening is easy once you learn how but appreciating music is a little harder, perhaps. How to even explain it You know you liked a piece of music or a song when you heard it for the first time, or maybe after a few listen. Then maybe you heard it again and decided to really listen to it. After listening to it, you begin to understand why you liked it; maybe it’s because of the beautiful melody of the song, the near-perfect harmony of the singers, the pulsing rhythm of the song or it could be the ringing guitar solo in the middle. To really appreciate the music you have to understand how the music is made (in effect how it is played, recorded and what goes into the recording. You don’t have to take any course to understand this, it’s simple really.
Generally, I’m going to talk about pop music here because that’s what the majority understand most. I would take pop music to generally cover pop, rock, alt-rock, heavy-metal, hip-hop, r&b, soul, synth-pop/rock, and everything else other than classical and jazz; where the instruments used are mainly the vocals, guitars, strings, drum or percussions, and bass. When you listened to music you liked, try to pay attention to all the instruments besides the voice. Naturally, the voice and melody are the most obvious parts of a song. Try to appreciate the other instruments too. The rhythm section (which are mainly the bass, percussion or drums, and perhaps keyboards such as piano or synth) is the most ignored part when listening to a song. The rhythm gives the song the foundation. Close your eyes, make an effort to just listen to the bass-line of a song you liked. Consciously try to shut out the melodic part (the part which you can hum to-mainly the vocals and guitars) and concentrate on the low notes being played.
To further appreciate music, you can learn to understand the little nuances of recorded music. Listen to those slight touches of reverb which ‘sweeten’ the vocals of all those lovely ballads. Here’s an example, if you listened carefully to The Beatles “Let It Be” which is a classic Beatles song by the way, you could actually hear reverb (or echo, as the Americans liked to say) on the cymbals. There are two versions of this song recorded – one on the original “Let It Be” album which has the reverb on the cymbals and the other on the newer “Let It Be…Naked” album which does not have the reverb. Another example: snare drums sound ‘fatter’ if you add a little reverb to them. You could try to identify other effects or tricks that are added to a musical mix. Look up terms like delay, flange, vocoder, equalization, pitch-shifting and then listen to music which has those effects. You do not need to be a musician to appreciate the sounds they create.
Is there an ultimate form of music appreciation then? It is one that is most simple. Music is really ‘food for the soul’ as someone once puts it. When you really think about it, music is an expression of our human emotion. The joy, sadness, anger, tragedy. It touches the heart. What is ‘good’ music then? Good music is any kind of music which appeals to the human emotion, pure and simple. It is the reason why music are made in the first place. Bad music? It is music with no artistic value and made for commercial reason-to make money, to profit from the buying public. But this is not to say that all commercial music are ‘bad’. It is only bad when its sole purpose is to serve the musician or in a bigger picture, the music industry commercial agenda.
And good music is made better by the memories it often evokes. That is the essence of music appreciation.
Joshua Wong works as an Accounts Executive and wants to promote awareness to good music and music appreciation. He’s also into the concept of internet marketing. Visit http://www.gcdetective. com/specialreport/index.htm?affid=40235