Listening With Your Eyes!

As a music teacher I am always concerned about listening.  Especially for musicians, listening to sound is very different than hearing sound.  Listening involves thinking, processing, evaluating, understanding and engaging with the music that is being played.  But in the world we live today, do students really engage in the music they hear?  Students are constantly hearing sound and in our school often wearing their headphones as a fashion statement, rather than as a tool for deeper listening.  They often have music playing when they do their homework and sometimes even their work at school.  But are they really listening? 

After listening to David McCandless’ Ted Talks, The Beauty of Data Visualization, I started thinking about how images can be used to make sense of things that don’t normally make sense.  Although music is something that is often enjoyed by many, it is also an art that many people don’t make sense of.  People listen to music but often lack skills in being able to articulate their thinking or understanding of the music.  In an age where young people constantly hear and have access to music it becomes increasingly important to teach students to process and evaluate as they hear music.   Music that is more complex or out of context to a particular society poses an even greater listening challenge to modern consumers of music and in some cases is already showing signs of extinction.  Finding ways to engage students in the act of listening, understanding, and making sense of complex music is a challenge that most music teachers face and one that must be overcome by music educators.   If we cannot help our students to better understand complex music, this music will most definitely not be listened to in the future and one day perhaps not even heard.

 Considering Bagi, Baraute, Ludovico and Haus’ paper, A Computer Tool to Enjoy and Understand Music  I started explore what is out there that would help students map, visualize or animate the music that they hear.   If students could see the elements of music – the form, the rhythm, the melody, the harmony and the compositional techniques, maybe they would make sense of the music that didn’t make sense to them before.   A music score (the staff and notes that are written upon it) is actually a form of graphing the music.  The music score allows us to see what is going on in the music, but only after a deeper understanding of the “code” that the music is written with.   I came across the work of Stephen Malinowski in Brain Pickings.  His software animates the very elements that I want students to understand so that they can listen to music rather than just hear it.  But would adding visual tools really help my students in their listening of classical music? 

So I put it to the test and what better time to test the music animation machine than on the final day of Middle School Spirit Week – a week where student focus and engagement has already been challenged to the limit.  I showed my seventh and eighth grade students Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor.   Over 8 minutes of baroque music and to my amazement even with their laptops still open they became mesmerized by the site and sounds of one of Bach’s most famous works.   I showed them another contrasting work and to my complete joy they were able to very quickly speak intelligently and articulately about the music that they had just viewed. For the rest of the class I allowed them to listen to the classical music that Malinowski had created and posted on you tube.  Not a single of the 30 students in the class was off task.  They listened they spoke to each other about the music and they even developed opinions about which pieces of music were incredible compositions.  It seems that visual literacy does have a place in the music classroom.  More importantly it seems visual tools have the potential to help people better understand music and engage in deeper listening.  That understanding and engagement may be some music’s last hope for survival in a world where students hear but do not listen to music.  Who would have known it, but we do listen with our eyes!