I like the points he makes and find that I already use several of his tips when I play in sessions. For example, I take silence breaks. Not 3 minutes of silence, but now and then I'll grab 10 or 20 or 30 seconds of ear rest--not playing, not talking, and not really listening. In the heat of a session, that kind of break can be restorative.
I also use the mixer idea a lot--listening to all the session sounds on separate tracks instead of one big wall of sound. I suspect most of us do this at times.
I suspect learning to play music is mostly a matter of learning to listen better--more actively, accurately, specifically, thoroughly, and with more understanding.
And I like Treasure's sense that being better listeners helps us understand and so to bring that understanding to our relationships. That might even play well here on the quiet riot of the Yellow Submarine....
Yes, learning how to become a better listener(i would listen to the talk, but i'm away from my computer and on my phone, talk about ironic.). Over my short days, i've learned that learning music by ear is a huge guessing game. The better you get, the more educated your guesses, the faster you get. Then magically, one day, you don't have to guess anymore. One day you'll hear a chord, or pattern, and know exactly what it is. Now, it takes as long for me to learn a song as it does to memorize it in my head. 1, 5, 6, 4. 1, 6, 4, 5, other common chord progressions, i know them when i hear them. All i have to do is find the key, which takes no time. Also hearing little melodic patterns, being able to tell the difference between descending and ascending, at extreme tempos. Finding chords in melodic progressions. Telling the difference between major and minor chords. And one of the extremes, telling intervals apart. Another, tuning in and out to make clear what you're trying to listen for. So many many more. Yes, learning how to become a better listener.
I agree with the importance of listening in playing, but the guy in that video is conflating a bunch of different ideas about sound, processing, memory, and attention under the "listening" umbrella, in order to make a "technology is evil" argument. He also seems to be sounding the alarm about a new crisis while suggesting that it all started with the advent of writing.
Much ado about nothing, IMHO. Reminds me of that old idea about how regional accents were going to be erased by national television (didn't happen).
Our ears and brains can handle the modern world just fine, we aren't losing our listening. The real problem is attention distraction, which has little to do with listening and music.
You know, i don't really think we have a problem, it's just a logical happening. People get better at what they practice. Those who work at listening, become better listeners. Those who work at making themselves physically stronger, become physically stronger. If people want to invest their practices in other areas, then that's their choice. Just like musical training can help you in other areas of your life, so can other things. But i'm just ranting of course, i still havent heard the talk.
No offence, but your first post in this thread is a description of NOT listening. Having pre-determined chord progressions and ideas of what you are going to be listening to, 'finding the key' then believing, or 'guessing' that you know how the tune is going to sound -- these things do not help you to listen. They might help you to play once you know what you should be aiming for, but they are barriers rather than aids.
You hear with your brain, not your ears, and just as there are optical illusions, there are audio illusions too. You can hear what you think you are going to hear -- what is not actually there. Wipe away all preconceived notions of what you are going to be hearing, and just LISTEN. After you have got all the information in, then is the time to try to make sense of it, analyse it, reproduce it, store it or whatever you intend.
It is hard and needs concentration and focus, but with practise it becomes easier. And as you rightly say, listening without prejudice (sic) can help enormously in other areas of life too.
Gam, i think i may have said it wrong, or you misunderstood me. The "Guessing" part is not trying to listen ahead to predict what might happen(from expectation). The "Guessing" part is hearing something, thinking about what it could possible be, then going to your instrument to find that something. It's not about what you think you're going to hear, but moreso, confirming what you think you heard. Does that make more sense?
Did you read the part where it says "Now, it takes as long to learn a song, as it does to memorize it in my head." That doesn't come from guessing. That comes from getting to know the song(i say song because all of the things that i said about my learnability is exclusively true with *pop* music), away from the instrument. Hearing it, listening to the different timbres, patterns, transitions. Then when the song is known inside and out, time to go to the instrument. At rapid speeds, the brain is going, "i think i *heard this hear, i think i *heard this there." It's not about expectation or prediction, because i'm working from the past tense, not the future tense. And we all know that it takes a mighty lot of listening to memorize songs.
Thanks Will. A good talk. I find the mixer approach (except that its an unmixer) really useful. Mentally going around the room trying to 'latch onto' to each instrument in turn during a set. Learning to recognize the timbre and the player's style within the mix (or mush ).
Oh, plus "From one art form to another..." In creative arts class, our teacher said "The more you look at the picture, the more accurate your drawing will be..." With music of course it's the same way. The more you listen, the more accurately you'll learn it(which has a lot to do with correcting mistakes). Not having a stereo, or ipod at my piano, i spent a lot of time hearing music by chance, memorizing it the best i could, and going home to try and figure it out. I soon learned that this was not healthy,(like seeing someone once, studying their face for about 3 min. then going home hours later and trying to draw their face) but it was good for temporary storage. Now i make every effort to be with a recording while im at my instrument, whether it's memorized or not. It helps learn a lot faster.
But don't confuse learning with listening. It's too easy to memorize what you think you heard. The same goes with drawing -- Disney characters having three fingers is a good example. Your brain just thinks 'hand' and hands have four fingers, right?
Some interesting thoughts alright but isn't it curious how the 'everybody' solution to the various and many problems that afflict society - is to 'teach it in the schools'!!
"...It's too easy to memorize what you think you heard..." That's what the instrument is for. Playing along with a recording over and over and over until all the notes you're playing, match what you're hearing. The confirmation stage. If what you're playing sounds anything different from what you're hearing, it's wrong. The hertz don't match. But if they sound exactly the same, they are exactly right.(well... except for those that are tone deaf...) About learning and listening. They're different but connected. You can't learn without listening, and chances are, if you're listening you're learning something. But if you're listening and not learning anything, maybe you're not listening at all. Now it becomes just hearing... You know, i'm saying a lot of things that go without saying. I'm just gonna shut up now and watch the rest of the discussion.
Neat talk. I completely agree with him, that listening, empathy, and understanding are not valued in our society. Everything is made up of florid sound bites, the news, politics, advertising, it's all screaming sensationalist crap at us. If governing were not about posturing, headlines, slamming the other guy, if it was about listening and finding solutions to problems through mutual understandings, governments of certain western countries would not be the useless piles of turds they currently are.
20 years ago I was asked by a Drongo/hippie how to go about learning to play by ear, my advice was start off with easy nursery rhymes, twinkle twinkle etc, or tunes are very familiar.
Playing any music by ear requires absorption of the tunes so that you know them well and can recognise musical intervals really well and quickly.
I find that over a long time, I hear further into recordings
and usually like them more. For example, the Michael Coleman
ones. I couldn't stand them at first, but somehow I can penetrate
them more now and although I'm still not a great fan, I can hear
how he has influenced some of today's players.
Not sure if I agree with him on this point: He states because of recording technology (written, audio and visual) we no longer HAVE to listen carefully, therefore we lose the ability to hear subtleties. I understand his viewpoint, however, the issue is not that simple. Listening to Matt Molloy 100,000 times (only possible if you're related to him or listening to his albums) allowed me to understand his subtleties. The first time I heard Matt I loved it, but hadn't a clue WHAT I was actually loving. Recordings technologies also allow us to hear more deeply if we listen consciously. Treasure's argument seems to stem more from the deficiencies of passive or distracting listening. This talk is brilliant though. You're right, his points on silence and his tips are great.
@ yhaalhouse
Well a hippie [Hippius maxamus ]you probably understand, a Drongo[ drongus minimus] is a sub species of this breed Its a classic case of mixing up two distinctly different sub-species and conflating them.
I understood his point about recording technology to be simply that without it one *had* to listen well because there was only one chance. Consider http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLUEMj6cwA , or that if the lassie was showing the secret knock to let the lover in then having to get in down in ABC with the right time signature(s) could reduce reproductive success.
But yes, having recording technology means we can practice and may be able to learn to do it better/faster. Without it I wouldn't have made much of a start.
@jcawley
I think what he was saying is not that we no longer have to listen carefully, but that we have lost the instinct to listen carefully because of the constant stream of audio input. If the world around you is silent, or even full of the noise of, say, cicadas, an unusual sound will instantly get your attention. If that sound turns out to be meaningless, our brains eventually stop hearing it. The trouble nowadays is that we are subjected to constant streams of sound all competing for our attention, with the result that we hear none of it. His talk is about reviving the ability to listen carefully and selectively, rather than switching off.
" Listening to Matt Molloy 100,000 times (only possible if you're related to him or listening to his albums) allowed me to understand his subtleties."
So you, having grown up with access to recording technology, are only able to acquire nuances of style from a player with the aid of repeated replay. However, we know that players without access to recording technology were able to acquire the styles they heard (listening to recordings of the old players seems to confirm this), and obviously they did it listening to a recording "100,000 times".
So I think in fact you do agree with him on that point, and in fact your anecdote seems to confirm it.
(I haven't had a chance to listen to the talk yet, so I'm going on your statement of the point here)
I realize that, which is why I stated 'I understand his viewpoint.' I also understand and agree with all the points you summarized so well. I was merely pointing out the other side of listening in a modern technological society. As he pointed out, conscious listening is the most important aspect of 'good listening,' this can be done through media as well as live sources. That's what I was trying to articulate.
@ Jon: "So you, having grown up with access to recording technology, are only able to acquire nuances of style from a player with the aid of repeated replay"
I never said people are ONLY able to listen to nuances via repeated listening, I was merely relaying my own experiences. Eventually I would have picked up the nuances of traditional music through years of repeated exposure to live music making. Recordings sped up the process for me.
Of course people learned subtleties without recordings, obviously the subtleties would never have existed otherwise. People learned music by listening to it '100,000 times' in the past as well (say Sliabh Luachra) because they were surrounded by it in everyday life. I'm surrounded by traditional music in everyday life as well, with the aid of recordings. You're correct, I do agree with Treasure.
I have little doubt that quite fundamental ways in which people listen to and retain information have been changed inexorably by technology ranging from parchment and quill to digital recorders. As Treasure was saying. I'm not making a value judgment about that and saying "Now we have books and recordings, the world's going tits up 'cause no one can memorize 100 verse ballads anymore," but more just stating a hypothesis.
I'll have to listen again () but I think the 'no one can memorize 100 verse ballads anymore' is off the point. He was talking about listening, hearing it in the first place, not memorising it.
On the off-topic but locally relevant angle - trad curmudgeons may say that we tend to sound like too much like those who have gone before because we can listen to and study recordings - and probablyy that it is the end of the folk process that relies on most people never having been able to memorise 100 verse ballads accurately.
Yes, David, I know. I was making my *own* point that the way in which hear, process, and yes, memorize information is quite different now. And Treasure made, very briefly, a similar point at the beginning of the talk, but more along the lines of how such things have de-emphasised the importance of listening.
Oh, OK , sorry TSS. Anyhow Treasure mentioned pattern matching. Do we want a pattern gained from hearing Matt Molloy 100,00 times or pattern gained from hearing, and sometimes miss-hearing, 100,000 different renderings of the tune ? One nugget I have from the internet is a suggestion that there is merit in not 'learning a tune too precisely' to allow flexibility in playing with different people.
I feel his points: listening more closely, paying attention, improving conversation skills, are all important things that can be very enriching and rewarding. However, his arguments to reach that conclusion are full of problems. A lot of what he says, I can't help but dislike, just because it is either misleading or overgeneralizing. He'd make a great politician or televangelist.
This is a good example of good public speaking skills. "Get their attention" "give them a reason to care" "organize and make your points effectively" "summarize"
He has good advice about listening, but not much more than anyone who has taken speech & comm in college, or even just a decent amount of life experience, shouldn't already know.
The idea that "we are losing our listening" is complete load of rubbish.
I'm definitely seeing a spreading of the "LA accent" (flat, nasal affect with rising intonation on statements, usually pronounced as if through a wad of chewing gum) throught out the northwest and the northeast, and not from people who have spent time in LA.
Oregon's accent isn't very distinctive for the most part, but here in Boston I've only heard one or two people who have the real old-school boston accent. There's lots of reference to it in local advertising, but it's not in actual use in the places I am.
I wouldn't judge a Ted presenter on the basis of one 5 minute clip. The format is abridged, more of a snap shot opportunity to put ideas in play, less so defending one's Ph.D. dissertation.
I've presented a 2 hour program for schools and a science museum about listening and our brains on music, and that barely scratches the surface.
violamike: "The idea that "we are losing our listening" is complete load of rubbish."
Meh. Maybe, maybe not. Treasure was speaking historically, over many generations. I'm not sure anyone can say for certain whether people in Homer's time (not Mr. Simpson) were better or worse listeners than we are now. I suspect Treasure has a point and can cite historical references to back it up. I also suspect a case could be made for the opposite--that today's ubiquity and multiplicity of sources may make us more selective, discerning listeners. Which means declaring an assertion one way or the other is "a complete load of rubbish" is itself a complete load of rubbish and a sign that one is perhaps not as good a listener and "understander" as one assumes....
I think there are probably still some places in the world with a substantial proportion of illiterate adults having little access to the radio and living away from roads.. But if anyone wants to compare over the equivalent of many generations they had better get on with it before those Millenium Development Goals have been reached.
"I wouldn't judge a Ted presenter on the basis of one 5 minute clip. The format is abridged, more of a snap shot opportunity to put ideas in play, less so defending one's Ph.D. dissertation."
When I first started seeing TED talks, I was impressed by the consistently high standard of the presentations that I saw and by the presenters themselves. At that time, based on what I'd seen, "TED talk" implied a serious discussion of an interesting topic, presented for the layman by a serious researcher in the field.
Since then, TED has jumped the shark, and seems to have become an infotainment organization, and based on what I'm seeing, that assumption is no longer a safe one. Being a "TED presenter" doesn't seem to convey anything more to me today than, say, "giving a lecture in a Harvard building". Well, you can hear some brilliant stuff in those halls, or you can hear that "positive pyschology" nonsense, which is apparently the most popular course offered at that school.
Note that I am not making any judgements on the clip in question - I've just got home, and haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. I'm just saying that, to me, "TED presenter" doesn't really have any juju any more.
"I'm not sure anyone can say for certain whether people in Homer's time (not Mr. Simpson) were better or worse listeners than we are now."
I don't know about Homer, but Frits Staal's work on the sanskrit pandit tradition is worth looking at in this context.
Dig up a thing he wrote called "Revere Memory" - it's a little technical, but you can hack it.
Based on his observations of a living oral culture. Very interesting, I thought.
Seems to me the presenter's thoughts are very cogent. I think his main point is that culture once demanded careful listening because of the transitory nature of information. Having the need to remember what was said is not nearly so important as it once was. After all, we no longer are being counseled to avoid sabre-tooth tigers any more.
And, we no longer entertain ourselves as we used to when radio and tv weren't around. Then we all had something entertaining we did. Now many of us can only slide DVDs into slots and otherwise provide a chance for devices to entertain us. The result: a decay in listening skills and all sorts of related "attention paying" skills. Those of us who are involved in music retain some of those skills, but none the less are a product of our environment. We can't quote big sections of poetry any more. We might know hundreds of tunes but haven't a prayer of remembering much of what was said to us concerning something else that we know we can look up.
So, our uses of our brains have changed. Our listening skills have changed. Certain things have been lost, and the presenter thinks those things are important. I think he has a point. But I also think we need to realize that we've developed many other skills we didn't have in times past too.
Jon, I agree--the overall standard of Ted Talks has declined, or been diluted.
Thanks for the Staal referral--I'll have to look him up. Sounds interesting. I've had some experience with Native storytellers who keep their tribe's oral history alive without a written source.
cboody, good points. We tend to remember stuff that's important to remember. But all our newfangled external storage technologies have trimmed that down to "stuff that's important to remember *and* that can't be stored elsewhere for ready retrieval." So it used to be important to have a headful of phone numbers of your family and friends (I still recall my childhood home phone number from 40 years ago). But now we rely on our phones' internal memory to store and retrieve that information, and, in most cases, much more of it.
I suspect that this alters how we pay attention to information in general, both aural and visual. Thanks to technology, most of what we see and hear now is disposable, at least as far as our brains are concerned. If we happen to need something again, we can probably find it in some device or on some web page....
It's true that technology has caused us to lose some skills, such as long-term memorization. That would go back to the advent of writing. And the phone number thing is a good point of how this has progressed: now that we don't even need to write a phone number down--just select a name from a menu--we don't memorize phone numbers like we used to.
Kids these days have trouble with cursive handwriting, telling time from analog watches, using printed reference books, etc. Because those skills aren't as needed and practiced as they used to be. Telling time from the sun, navigating by the stars, using a slide rule, etc. are all skills that went from necessity to novelty due to technological progress.
This is not a process of loss, but of change, adaptation, and progress.
A central principle of information science is to augment human intellect. The fact that we let technology take over certain things that we used to use our brains for does not just mean that we are losing something, it also means that we are freeing ourselves from certain tasks and gaining speed and productivity as a result, allowing us to do things that we could not do before.
If you want to know more about the ideas behind augmenting human intellect with information technology, this is required viewing:
If you see technology as a negative because it causes us to lose certain abilities, then you aren't looking at the other side of things. It allows us to gain much more, and what is lost is normally lost because it is no longer necessary and important.
I still think that this has little to do with listening, in the musical sense.
Math is another good example of how technology has changed things. Why do long form division when a calculator is generally much easier and more reliable? I still think it is good to learn how it is done, just to understand the concepts and why it works.
Still, conscious listening, paying attention, social skills, developing interpersonal relationships, are all things that promote success and happiness. Modern technology can either promote this by making it easier to multitask and/or save time, or it can be distracting by spending too much time alone, staring at computer displays or tuning people out with portable music players.
There are always going to be people with good listening skills (which is the main reason I said he was full of rubbish), and everyone is capable of it, especially when something holds their interest. The difference is how many people use it and how often, and why. The difference between the two (IMHO) is probably more to do with maturity, education, good parenting, and money instead of technology. So, as with so many other problems, the answer would be to improve education and the standards of living for the lower and middle class.
Overall I do agree with a majority of what he said, and that the skills are applicable to the musical world.
I have to think that the ability to retain information inside one's skullbone is an important one, and it's one that's being eroded, and that erosion is enabled by the technologies we have available to us today.
This is not a "technology is evil" idea, it's an observation: most people can't remember dick any more, because they don't have to.
Nobody remembers a phone number any more, because their phone does it for them. Knowledge - deep, in-depth knowledge of a subject - is now looked on as a weird affectation, because you can look all that stuff up on Google or Wikipedia. Again: this is not "technology is evil", but one side effect of the technology is one that any sensible person thinks is a real problem. The technology itself is both cool and useful, but it has a side effect, and that side effect has to be reckoned with, if you're thinking about the technology at all.
Concrete example: I do some Java coaching on some of the programming boards, and there are kids who don't know the classes they're supposed to be working with, the basic classes of the language, because they have an IDE to fill in the bits for them. For non-programmers, this is exactly like someone trying to learn carpentry and being unable to remember whether the hammer is the one you use to put the nails in, or if it's the wrench. And if they guess that it's the hammer, they have no idea which of a dozen hammers in the toolbox is the one they want to use.
This doesn't mean the IDE is a Bad Thing - it can be a good thing, in the hands of someone who's got the skills to make use of it. But a novice programmer with a tool that fills in the bits for them has no immediate lash forcing them to actually know what they're doing - and so, they find that a few years in, they don't really know the libraries that they're supposed to be writing in. I see these people every day, this is not a hypothetical situation, or some dark imagining of mine. The technology is good and useful, and it enables a state of affairs which is problematic in the long term. Presumably we can keep both of these ideas in our heads at the same time.
I think a lot of this is actually a failure to take control of the change that is happening, it's a failure to adapt technology to our actual needs, and while it may be progress, it might be progress down a dead-end street.
I have to disagree with both Marklar and violamike a bit. I don't think technology needs any defenders. Everyone is, or certainly should be, aware of the positive impact of technology. The question are: what kinds of impact does this have on listening carefully and retaining what we have heard. In my view the impact is huge and not without problem. Remember, we are talking generations of time here. It has certainly been a century since reading became a common skill in much of Europe and North America, and the telephone and radio have been around for nearly that long. So, yes, there will always be people with good listening skills relative to the skills common to their era, but I venture to suggest that the level of listening skills across time have decreased, and that is what is important.
It is somewhat similar to the decrease in vocabulary skills from, say 1865 to today. I just finished a book on the infamous Andersonville Prison (Confederate prison in the US Civil War). It was written be a reasonably literate soldier who had been captive there and other places and had survived. He became a newspaper writer after the war and I believe parts of the book were published as articles. What struck me, besides the story, was both the articulateness and the use of language. I don't often need a dictionary, but I used it for this book. This was a "common man" writing for the "common man." Today many folks would be unable to read the book well because they would drown in the vocabulary and the references to Shakespeare and 19th century poets. So, what has happened? Public discourse has been dumbed down, expectations on students have been relaxed and so we no longer have the vocabularies and reference points common in the past. We haven't needed them so.... One can multiply this sort of example, but the point is that something has been lost.
Similarly the music listening skills have been lost. When I was an undergrad (a long time ago!) I had to be taught the rudiments of various structural principles used in classical music and given listening examples to help me hear them in practice. A couple of generations earlier many more folks would have heard that sort of music enough so that they would have absorbed the principles and have been able to appreciate how composers used the principles...without having to study things. I'm sure similar examples can be developed in the ITM world, and indeed in any culture's music. You will now hear heavy metal or rap or whatever everywhere in the world. This is not to say those are bad musics, but they do take away from the chance to focus on the music of the culture you live in, be it "classical" or "traditional." And, without those skills those of us wanting to get involved with a music have to start from much further back. We don't have the background in listening, and we don't know how to listen as well.
Yes folks out hear are probably ahead of the curve by virtue of years of practice and involvement. But, I venture to suggest it takes folks longer and longer to get deeply involved in their chosen music. The lack of careful listening engendered by technology and the reduction in examples surrounding us simply makes it necessary for us to struggle longer.
Somewhere I suspect there are even brain use studies that support this. Anyone got those references?
Well, Jon, look at it this way. The ability to store and retrieve information quickly and easily may mean that people don't need to memorize things they used to have to, but it doesn't follow that no one is using their memory anymore and everyone's brains are going to atrophy.
People still have to remember things, just different things. You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?
The IDE thing is a bad example. It may be good for beginning programmers to use a simple text editor, to force them to learn the keywords, syntax, basic classes, etc. But IDEs don't dumb down programming; for professional programmers working on large projects they are a necessity, and they increase productivity dramatically. The advent of IDEs hasn't resulted in programmers needing to remember less, they just keep you from having to pull a book off a shelf to see what methods are available on this obscure class you just ran into.
I do think that memory is something that you develop with practice. I believe that human memory is basically infinite in capacity, and what we require is the skill to use it. I'm definitely not talking about the fad for rote storage of trivia kicked off by Safran-Foer's brother's book. I'm talking about the construction of a massively-linked network of ideas, not a bunch of randomly-generated one-directional one-dimensional associations.
I just don't see people practicing this around me. Instead, people are doing their best to not have to know things. This doesn't make your brain work better!
The usual justification for this sort of thing is that by not having to remember X, we make room in the memory for Y and Z, which are somehow more important - as if memory were a finite capacity, like the metaphor of the attic from Holmes. I think Holmes was wrong: instead of "saving space for important stuff" by not remembering things every day, we make it harder to remember things.
Someone who dials their own phone numbers is more likely to remember a new one, not less likely. Someone who knows the methods of a large number of library classes is more likely to grasp a new class quickly and well, not less likely.
If I'm right in this, every memory-sparing device is actually eating away at its user's capacity to learn, unless that person is learning something else instead, and I just don't see that happening. People don't load up their heads with the important dates of nineteenth-century European history because they've been spared the effort of knowing a phone number. They don't do anything at all. And the communication tools today show this is the case. What's the hottest thing running? Twitter - a medium in which actually communicating anything beyond a triviality or a wisecrack is simply impossible - is now a required distraction for anyone looking to be "with it".
So where do we see people actually learning? What are people doing with those brains of theirs? What is occupying all of those grey cells? What mighty wonders of cognition are being unleashed by all of this saving of mental labor?
"You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?"
Remember passwords? Have you not heard of auto-completion? Every browser remembers your passwords for you!
(re: IDE's, I think I did say that an IDE can be a useful tool for someone who knows the language. The problem is that it also prevents people from being people who know the language...)
Certainly some technologies are helpful and "good," but some technologies at the very least have "bad" ramifications for humanity, or what it means to be human. I worry that we're succumbing to engineering, which more often than not does things simply because it can, even when it's in our better interest not to do those things. Biological weapons strike me as an apt example of unhinged engineering.
Not that sound recording devices are on par with weaponized anthrax.
But people like Ray Kruzweil genuinely worry me. He wants to implant nanobots in our bloodstream to augment our immune systems and memory, among other things. He loathes death and so would like nothing more than to technologically extend the human lifespan to hundreds of years. On the surface, that sounds okay--few of us embrace our mortality. Most of us enjoy life and would love to keep going as long as we're physically and mentally sound.
But imagine a world packed with 300 year-olds competing for space and resources with all the sub-200 year- old youngsters. Think we have famines and territorial battles now? Yikes!
My main concern is that we're using technology to desperately escape our own biology, and we're succeeding through biotechnology, genetic tinkering, nanorobots, and the ongoing surge of exponentially "smarter" computer intelligence, all without understanding the impact on ourselves as organisms evolved to suit our natural habitat, and without understanding the impact to this biosphere that lets us live in an otherwise harsh solar system.
Today, the pace of technological change outstrips our ability to comprehend and manage it. Soon (in generational terms), we'll lose control. We won't be able to anticipate most of the effects and side effects, and won't be able to stop the ripple of momentum.
So maybe Treasure's ideas about listening offer one way to get back in touch with our basic nature, as mammals, as organisms shaped by 200,000 years of natural selection so that we're well adapted to our environment. Rather than endlessly reshaping our environment, adapting it to us.
"So where do we see people actually learning? What are people doing with those brains of theirs? What is occupying all of those grey cells? What mighty wonders of cognition are being unleashed by all of this saving of mental labor?
"You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?"
Remember passwords? Have you not heard of auto-completion? Every browser remembers your passwords for you! "
Well, there were plenty of people who didn't remember phone numbers before these things were stored in the phone. They used to write it down in a book, often keeping it beside the big bakelite monstrosity with a dial on it - that thing you had to put a finger in and it whirred back. Took ages to dial a number outside the UK.
I'm one of those who could and did memorise phone numbers. Many are still there from years back, and I still memorise new ones. For some strange reason, I can't memorise cell phone numbers. Not sure if it's the different format or just a subconscious rejection of new-fangled things.
Watching my daughter (she is 6) learning at home and school is heartening. She wouldn't touch a computer for ages. We had to open up her Disney and Barbie pages for her and do all the mousework. Then one day a peer at the nursery (she was 4) 'showed her how to do it' (I reckon she actually knew but 'allowed' her friend to teach her). She came back home and could do everything. Switch it on, type her name, open up the web pages she wanted, etc. She can work out how to perform tasks on the thing at an amazing rate, while her granny is still struggling to open up a browser. She had been watching us using the computer and absorbing it all - along with that capacity for learning how to use new-fangled thingies.
She can also tell people what it is that lurks within that "cuckoo spit" on the stems of plants - that one day it will be a froghopper, jumping from plant to plant. What kind of animals the buzzards in the sky prey on. Her reading skills are developing at an incredible rate.
The point I'm making is that a lot of this "kids of today don't know how to learn" stuff is just things you have to say as a member of the Old Farts' Club. Sure, there are skills that no longer need to be learned, so they are avoided. It doesn't mean brains will become addled and cease to be employed for anything other than pushing buttons. Different things will be 'stored in the database' - things that are relevant (my daughter is still refusing to touch a phone, but it is quite possible that she will remember phone numbers when she starts using one - some of her peers do).
I was involved in a conversation with fellow Old Farts' Club members some time back concerning kids using text messages. The usual topics arose "kids can't spell these days", "look at the dreadful abbreviations they are using" etc. Somebody pointed out (a professional guitarist who is also an English teacher) that "back in the good old days" a lot of these kids simply wouldn't be getting involved with reading and writing at all, except when they had to in school. Now they are actually using the written word to communicate (albeit in an adapted language). Not quite the regression that it is made out to be. Kids are still using the grey matter. As I struggle to remember what I was planning to do five minutes ago (though I can still remember landline numbers) and brush another fallen white hair off my clothing, I still question the membership requirements of the Old Farts' Club.
Maybe things are changing, but not necessarily for the worse. A lot of it is our inabilty to adapt to, or accept the change.
I really dread being the old fart that used to bemoan the "long hair" and thing of that ilk when I was growing up.
Great discussion. This is thesession.org at its best.
A few thoughts which jumped into my head:
I think the trend for brevity and simplicity in English written work has been ongoing for a generation or more and has a lot to do with the way writing is taught to kids and the kind of writing which people are most frequently exposed to -- newspapers, magazines, and so on. When I was in school I was taught to avoid obscure vocabulary, complicated sentences, and if you could say something in one sentence, then don't bloody well use three. There was even a sign on the classroom wall in one high school English class which stated "Don't use a long word when a diminutive one will do." I haven't read a single 18th or 19th century piece of writing, and that's not novels; that is mostly stuff like newspaper articles, court papers, and mental asylum case notes, which employed these "bare-bones" principles to any degree. They're all a bit like the Andersonville Prison narrative cboody mentioned. That's how people wrote.
Here's a very short article from the Inverness Journal in 1830 which I think illustrates, in less than 200 words, the syntactic complexity of "everyday" writing, a style which you don't find in journalism now:
"Our readers will recollect that John Smith, from Stornoway, was in September last placed at the bar of the Circuit Court here, accused of having murdered Donald Smith, a young man belonging to Stornoway, with a spade. Smith’s intellect was always considered weak; and two Doctors, who were examined before the Justiciary Court, swore that in their opinion, he was totally incapable of instructing his Counsel to conduct his case – in short, that he was insane. The Court therefore ordered him to be conveyed back to the jail of Tain, there to remain subject to future orders of the High Court of Justiciary. The unfortunate maniac, however, became lately much indisposed, probably in consequence of his confinement, and died last week. His intellect since his imprisonment appeared to be totally deranged and he did not seem to be aware of the enormity of the crime of which he was accused; but when the murder was alluded to he was sometimes heard to say in Gaelic, “I did not kill him.”"
Technology like Twitter and text messaging enhances the brevity of people's writing but stylistically, things have been going that way for a while. No one wants to see all those semi-colons, dashes, and dependent clauses.
That's obviously a total tangent from the listening issue. Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's actually a symptom of the ever increasing trend towards soundbites and simplicity and the dismissal of nuance by the modern media.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if skills atrophy, or vanish. I'm a bit useless at reading an analogue clock and even more useless at long division but my mother only figured out how to attach a file to an email last year; however she can read an analogue clock and do long division. With these sorts of skill sets, I don't think it greatly matters if you can do them or not, at least not until that moment comes when you have to do long division by hand or you ask your boyfriend what time it is and he just shows you his analogue watch and doesn't say anything.
What is more concerning, however, and what some of you guys are saying, is the way technology seems to be eroding our attention skills and even our social skills. Quite a few studies have come out which show how much multitasking impairs cognitive ability (hmmm... how many windows do I have open on my browser as I write this post... um, three) and managing a constant stream of media, flicking from one thing to another, means people's ability to focus on one thing suffers greatly. The other day we were listening to a radio program (online) and I was having a hard time sitting and just listening, and not fussing about with other browser windows. It was a bit scary. I used to listen to A Prairie Home Companion when I was a kid, and I was able to listen and not have the compulsion to be doing something else at the same time.
I think you have accept and hold in your head the seemingly opposing ideas that technological changes are neutral (i.e. analogue v. digital clocks), positive (i.e. the ease and cheapness of long distance communication), and negative (i.e. erosion of attentive and listening skills).
I still haven't listened to it again to check up on some things.
Reading that paragraph from 1830 out loud it is possible to use tone of voice to make the dependant clauses work. It sounds a bit old fashioned but it works better than in text. It needs at least one extra pause/comma. I wonder if we have started writing less like how we talk and so less like what we hear in conversation.
I have tried sometimes to post short extracts from the interviews on the Folktrax cassettes to highlight what the old timers said about what they did. Working out how to punctuate them to carry the sense of the spoken word was really hard.
If had spoken it I would have worded that last paragraph differently. In conversation, as when listening, I would only had one chance.
I now have listened again. I thought so. Apart from saying right at the beginning that we only retain 15% of what we hear he was not talking about memory, about remembering, he was talking about understanding, hearing what was meant, at the time. Which was what Will wrote about in the OP. The discussion went interestingly off-topic as discussions and bar-room conversations do. But were we broadcasting what came to mind rather than listening to the talk and the thoughts in the OP ?
LOL, David, how do we know you just weren't listening and retaining well?
The memory issue comes into it because if you're not listening well and understanding the stimulus in the first place, you won't have any useful information to retrieve (except perhaps that you'll want to listen better next time).
When I was in my senior year in college, a beautiful co-ed classmate of mine asked me if we could study together for an upcoming test, using my notes. But I didn't have any notes to study from--I just paid attention during class, thought through what we were learning in the moment, and retained it. The look she gave me was a mix of disbelief and apprehension bordering on fear. My listening and retention skills didn't help me think quick enough in the moment to be her study partner sans notes and she scurried back to her friends like I was Bobo the Three-Headed Boy.
I simply never got the habit of taking notes, all through grade school and university. It was more efficient and natural to simply pay attention in the first place. Retaining and retrieving information/knowledge follows attention and intention. This approach worked well for me. I was an A student through high school, graduated a year early, and finished college with a 3.9 GPA. Not bragging, just offering anecdotal evidence that listening well is a useful skill that many people don't use to its potential.
I have a poster in my teaching room that says "Listening is active, attentive, specific, and responsive." I think that combo makes for good listening and so on to understanding. Works a treat for music, and for communicating with others, too.
Will's comments are interesting. I too depended largely on my listening skills to get through schooling. I grad school I took notes, but mostly to keep myself focused on listening. I seldom if ever looked at them except to remind myself of the lecture. Under the pressure of the exam I could often recall sections of the lecture. Oddly enough though this same skill made it easy for me to absorb good sized hunks of classical music it never carried over into translating what I hear to either notation or playing. I've had to struggle to build that bridge.
Oh! Will, I had a similar invite from a co-ed. I went over. Nothing happened. Probably because I was too dense to understand what she had in mind when she remarked that no one would be home at all that evening....
Same here (to Will and cboody) regarding notes and relying on either understanding at the time or retaining enough to sort it out in my head later, often with some reading. I can also identify with Jerone's (are you around ?) wanting to synthesise and set his new knowledge out clearly in his posts here. Not that I usually wrote it down, more just to get the satisfaction of getting it straight in my head.
But nothing in the way I learned was relevant to music or physical skills like Will''s juggling (my sibling got those genes) . I am only making progress with that later in life and it's a new way of approaching learning. So that aspect of listening in itself is not related to music for me. I think when I do something similar to Treasure's 'mixing' it is both learning to discriminate within the sound but also setting up the filters and patterns to match for later use. Reminds me of listening to the dawn chorus with an expert and trying to pick out from the mix the sounds that were pointed out when first heard.
David (and Jerone), I find that teaching others has been a tremendous help for my own understanding of listening to and playing music because I have to explain and articulate what I think I do and know. That process of thinking about it all and putting it into words and specific demonstrations is, in a way, a process of learning to listen to myself, both as I play music, and as I think and talk about it. It creates an ongoing feedback (or feedforward) loop that continues to improve my ability to listen and understand music. I'd be less of a musician if I weren't also a teacher.
I'm the first to admit that technology always has a dark side, but I really don't buy that it's hurting the arts, because I don't really see a decline in the quality of music, literature, etc. over the past few decades. If anything, the arts have gained a lot of valuable new tools.
If you really want to worry about where technology is taking us, worry about privacy. The loss of privacy is the chief danger that technology poses right now. This will become a huge issue over the next decade. Trust me, it's already gone further than most people can imagine.
There is a tech boom going on in data mining right now, driven by social networking, which is really just a way to get people to willingly hand over personal information to private companies.
Your private info is worth money to companies, and most people are giving it away. And once you give it up, it's out there forever and you have no control. Oh, and (at least in the US) the government can access this data pretty much at will.
Imagine what it would be like if every place you've gone, every post you've written, every purchase you've made, etc. were public knowledge. It's coming. This data is already being aggregated so that it can all be tied to you. Your data will not only be sold to companies and made available to governments, it will be available to anyone for a fee.
This is just a glimpse into what is coming over the next few years:
Oh, and if you use your real name as your handle here, Google has everything you've posted with that name, and is aggregating this with every other bit of information that it can tie to you. Which is more data than you might think, if you use email, online banking, read news on the Web, etc. It's not just kids on Facebook who are at risk.
Those links are really tip of the iceberg stuff.
There's a fun and scary and pretty good book called "Little Brother", written by Cory Doctorow. Don't be surprised if you have to go to the "young adult" section to find it - it is in fact a young adult novel, but it's still the best thing on right now.
As for using real names here or elsewhere on the web, that's a decision I made for myself for a very good reason, and I wish more people would do it. Read Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect", if you want to know why.
(I made the decision to avoid anonymity long before I Zimbardo wrote the book, but he did his experiments long before I made the decision, so we'll call it a tie)
I've always assumed that anything I've ever done online--not just posts--is public. You'd have to be naive to believe otherwise.
I've seen first hand how technology is hurting this art--people forgoing learning a tune from the living, breathing musician right in front of them, and instead turning on a recording device. That depersonalizes the exchange and misses a central point (human interaction, craic) to playing this music. Already we have a generation or two who get most of their tunes from recordings, not straight from other puddles of dna. I suspect this diminishes the sense of community, and that can't bode well for the community of musicians who play this music.
Learning to Listen
Learning to Listen
Just a hunch, but my experience of learning to play music has mostly been a process of learning to listen better.
Which is the topic of this Ted Talk by Julian Treasure (thanks to one of my session mates for sending me the link):
http://blog.ted.com/2011/07/29/5-ways-to-listen-better-julian-treasure-on-ted-com/
I like the points he makes and find that I already use several of his tips when I play in sessions. For example, I take silence breaks. Not 3 minutes of silence, but now and then I'll grab 10 or 20 or 30 seconds of ear rest--not playing, not talking, and not really listening. In the heat of a session, that kind of break can be restorative.
I also use the mixer idea a lot--listening to all the session sounds on separate tracks instead of one big wall of sound. I suspect most of us do this at times.
I suspect learning to play music is mostly a matter of learning to listen better--more actively, accurately, specifically, thoroughly, and with more understanding.
And I like Treasure's sense that being better listeners helps us understand and so to bring that understanding to our relationships. That might even play well here on the quiet riot of the Yellow Submarine....
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
Yes, learning how to become a better listener(i would listen to the talk, but i'm away from my computer and on my phone, talk about ironic.). Over my short days, i've learned that learning music by ear is a huge guessing game. The better you get, the more educated your guesses, the faster you get. Then magically, one day, you don't have to guess anymore. One day you'll hear a chord, or pattern, and know exactly what it is. Now, it takes as long for me to learn a song as it does to memorize it in my head. 1, 5, 6, 4. 1, 6, 4, 5, other common chord progressions, i know them when i hear them. All i have to do is find the key, which takes no time. Also hearing little melodic patterns, being able to tell the difference between descending and ascending, at extreme tempos. Finding chords in melodic progressions. Telling the difference between major and minor chords. And one of the extremes, telling intervals apart. Another, tuning in and out to make clear what you're trying to listen for. So many many more. Yes, learning how to become a better listener.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
I agree with the importance of listening in playing, but the guy in that video is conflating a bunch of different ideas about sound, processing, memory, and attention under the "listening" umbrella, in order to make a "technology is evil" argument. He also seems to be sounding the alarm about a new crisis while suggesting that it all started with the advent of writing.
Much ado about nothing, IMHO. Reminds me of that old idea about how regional accents were going to be erased by national television (didn't happen).
Our ears and brains can handle the modern world just fine, we aren't losing our listening. The real problem is attention distraction, which has little to do with listening and music.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Marklar
Re: Learning to Listen
You know, i don't really think we have a problem, it's just a logical happening. People get better at what they practice. Those who work at listening, become better listeners. Those who work at making themselves physically stronger, become physically stronger. If people want to invest their practices in other areas, then that's their choice. Just like musical training can help you in other areas of your life, so can other things. But i'm just ranting of course, i still havent heard the talk.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
@ Jerone,
No offence, but your first post in this thread is a description of NOT listening. Having pre-determined chord progressions and ideas of what you are going to be listening to, 'finding the key' then believing, or 'guessing' that you know how the tune is going to sound -- these things do not help you to listen. They might help you to play once you know what you should be aiming for, but they are barriers rather than aids.
You hear with your brain, not your ears, and just as there are optical illusions, there are audio illusions too. You can hear what you think you are going to hear -- what is not actually there. Wipe away all preconceived notions of what you are going to be hearing, and just LISTEN. After you have got all the information in, then is the time to try to make sense of it, analyse it, reproduce it, store it or whatever you intend.
It is hard and needs concentration and focus, but with practise it becomes easier. And as you rightly say, listening without prejudice (sic) can help enormously in other areas of life too.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by gam
Re: Learning to Listen
Gam, i think i may have said it wrong, or you misunderstood me. The "Guessing" part is not trying to listen ahead to predict what might happen(from expectation). The "Guessing" part is hearing something, thinking about what it could possible be, then going to your instrument to find that something. It's not about what you think you're going to hear, but moreso, confirming what you think you heard. Does that make more sense?
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
Yup.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by gam
Re: Learning to Listen
Did you read the part where it says "Now, it takes as long to learn a song, as it does to memorize it in my head." That doesn't come from guessing. That comes from getting to know the song(i say song because all of the things that i said about my learnability is exclusively true with *pop* music), away from the instrument. Hearing it, listening to the different timbres, patterns, transitions. Then when the song is known inside and out, time to go to the instrument. At rapid speeds, the brain is going, "i think i *heard this hear, i think i *heard this there." It's not about expectation or prediction, because i'm working from the past tense, not the future tense. And we all know that it takes a mighty lot of listening to memorize songs.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
Oh! and no offense taken. Sorry, i should've said that first. We all know that i'm not the best at clear communication.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
Well I understood what you meant just fine...
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by No Cause For Alarm
Re: Learning to Listen
Thanks Will. A good talk. I find the mixer approach (except that its an unmixer) really useful. Mentally going around the room trying to 'latch onto' to each instrument in turn during a set. Learning to recognize the timbre and the player's style within the mix (or mush
).
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
Oh, plus "From one art form to another..." In creative arts class, our teacher said "The more you look at the picture, the more accurate your drawing will be..." With music of course it's the same way. The more you listen, the more accurately you'll learn it(which has a lot to do with correcting mistakes). Not having a stereo, or ipod at my piano, i spent a lot of time hearing music by chance, memorizing it the best i could, and going home to try and figure it out. I soon learned that this was not healthy,(like seeing someone once, studying their face for about 3 min. then going home hours later and trying to draw their face) but it was good for temporary storage. Now i make every effort to be with a recording while im at my instrument, whether it's memorized or not. It helps learn a lot faster.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
But don't confuse learning with listening. It's too easy to memorize what you think you heard. The same goes with drawing -- Disney characters having three fingers is a good example. Your brain just thinks 'hand' and hands have four fingers, right?
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by gam
Re: Learning to Listen
Some interesting thoughts alright but isn't it curious how the 'everybody' solution to the various and many problems that afflict society - is to 'teach it in the schools'!!
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by the wounded hussar
Re: Learning to Listen
"...It's too easy to memorize what you think you heard..." That's what the instrument is for. Playing along with a recording over and over and over until all the notes you're playing, match what you're hearing. The confirmation stage. If what you're playing sounds anything different from what you're hearing, it's wrong. The hertz don't match. But if they sound exactly the same, they are exactly right.(well... except for those that are tone deaf...) About learning and listening. They're different but connected. You can't learn without listening, and chances are, if you're listening you're learning something. But if you're listening and not learning anything, maybe you're not listening at all. Now it becomes just hearing... You know, i'm saying a lot of things that go without saying. I'm just gonna shut up now and watch the rest of the discussion.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Learning to Listen
Neat talk. I completely agree with him, that listening, empathy, and understanding are not valued in our society. Everything is made up of florid sound bites, the news, politics, advertising, it's all screaming sensationalist crap at us. If governing were not about posturing, headlines, slamming the other guy, if it was about listening and finding solutions to problems through mutual understandings, governments of certain western countries would not be the useless piles of turds they currently are.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Learning to Listen
20 years ago I was asked by a Drongo/hippie how to go about learning to play by ear, my advice was start off with easy nursery rhymes, twinkle twinkle etc, or tunes are very familiar.
Playing any music by ear requires absorption of the tunes so that you know them well and can recognise musical intervals really well and quickly.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Joseph Tailyour
Re: Learning to Listen
I find that over a long time, I hear further into recordings
and usually like them more. For example, the Michael Coleman
ones. I couldn't stand them at first, but somehow I can penetrate
them more now and although I'm still not a great fan, I can hear
how he has influenced some of today's players.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Hup
Re: Learning to Listen
Wotteffah is a 'Drongo/hippie'?!
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by yhaalhouse
Re: Learning to Listen
Will & others.
If you haven't heard this ted talk yet treat yourself. http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html
Love the one you posted as well. So many good background information about what is really happening. Thanks for it!
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by jcawley
Re: Learning to Listen
Not sure if I agree with him on this point: He states because of recording technology (written, audio and visual) we no longer HAVE to listen carefully, therefore we lose the ability to hear subtleties. I understand his viewpoint, however, the issue is not that simple. Listening to Matt Molloy 100,000 times (only possible if you're related to him or listening to his albums) allowed me to understand his subtleties. The first time I heard Matt I loved it, but hadn't a clue WHAT I was actually loving. Recordings technologies also allow us to hear more deeply if we listen consciously. Treasure's argument seems to stem more from the deficiencies of passive or distracting listening. This talk is brilliant though. You're right, his points on silence and his tips are great.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by jcawley
Re: Learning to Listen
@ yhaalhouse
Well a hippie [Hippius maxamus ]you probably understand, a Drongo[ drongus minimus] is a sub species of this breed Its a classic case of mixing up two distinctly different sub-species and conflating them.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Learning to Listen
I understood his point about recording technology to be simply that without it one *had* to listen well because there was only one chance. Consider http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLUEMj6cwA , or that if the lassie was showing the secret knock to let the lover in then having to get in down in ABC with the right time signature(s) could reduce reproductive success.
But yes, having recording technology means we can practice and may be able to learn to do it better/faster. Without it I wouldn't have made much of a start.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
@jcawley
I think what he was saying is not that we no longer have to listen carefully, but that we have lost the instinct to listen carefully because of the constant stream of audio input. If the world around you is silent, or even full of the noise of, say, cicadas, an unusual sound will instantly get your attention. If that sound turns out to be meaningless, our brains eventually stop hearing it. The trouble nowadays is that we are subjected to constant streams of sound all competing for our attention, with the result that we hear none of it. His talk is about reviving the ability to listen carefully and selectively, rather than switching off.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by gam
Re: Learning to Listen
" Listening to Matt Molloy 100,000 times (only possible if you're related to him or listening to his albums) allowed me to understand his subtleties."
So you, having grown up with access to recording technology, are only able to acquire nuances of style from a player with the aid of repeated replay. However, we know that players without access to recording technology were able to acquire the styles they heard (listening to recordings of the old players seems to confirm this), and obviously they did it listening to a recording "100,000 times".
So I think in fact you do agree with him on that point, and in fact your anecdote seems to confirm it.
(I haven't had a chance to listen to the talk yet, so I'm going on your statement of the point here)
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
I realize that, which is why I stated 'I understand his viewpoint.' I also understand and agree with all the points you summarized so well. I was merely pointing out the other side of listening in a modern technological society. As he pointed out, conscious listening is the most important aspect of 'good listening,' this can be done through media as well as live sources. That's what I was trying to articulate.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by jcawley
Re: Learning to Listen
@ Jon: "So you, having grown up with access to recording technology, are only able to acquire nuances of style from a player with the aid of repeated replay"
I never said people are ONLY able to listen to nuances via repeated listening, I was merely relaying my own experiences. Eventually I would have picked up the nuances of traditional music through years of repeated exposure to live music making. Recordings sped up the process for me.
Of course people learned subtleties without recordings, obviously the subtleties would never have existed otherwise. People learned music by listening to it '100,000 times' in the past as well (say Sliabh Luachra) because they were surrounded by it in everyday life. I'm surrounded by traditional music in everyday life as well, with the aid of recordings. You're correct, I do agree with Treasure.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by jcawley
Re: Learning to Listen
I have little doubt that quite fundamental ways in which people listen to and retain information have been changed inexorably by technology ranging from parchment and quill to digital recorders. As Treasure was saying. I'm not making a value judgment about that and saying "Now we have books and recordings, the world's going tits up 'cause no one can memorize 100 verse ballads anymore," but more just stating a hypothesis.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Learning to Listen
Heh, funny how we all heard different (even divergent) things in that talk....
Yes, the Evelyn Glennie one is terrific too.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
TED has some fantastic stuff on it.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Learning to Listen
I'll have to listen again (
) but I think the 'no one can memorize 100 verse ballads anymore' is off the point. He was talking about listening, hearing it in the first place, not memorising it.
On the off-topic but locally relevant angle - trad curmudgeons may say that we tend to sound like too much like those who have gone before because we can listen to and study recordings - and probablyy that it is the end of the folk process that relies on most people never having been able to memorise 100 verse ballads accurately.
Did I read somewhere that this was making one of the same points ? http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/2399
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
Yes, David, I know. I was making my *own* point that the way in which hear, process, and yes, memorize information is quite different now. And Treasure made, very briefly, a similar point at the beginning of the talk, but more along the lines of how such things have de-emphasised the importance of listening.
I'm late somewhere. Balls.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Learning to Listen
Oh, OK , sorry TSS. Anyhow Treasure mentioned pattern matching. Do we want a pattern gained from hearing Matt Molloy 100,00 times or pattern gained from hearing, and sometimes miss-hearing, 100,000 different renderings of the tune ? One nugget I have from the internet is a suggestion that there is merit in not 'learning a tune too precisely' to allow flexibility in playing with different people.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
I feel his points: listening more closely, paying attention, improving conversation skills, are all important things that can be very enriching and rewarding. However, his arguments to reach that conclusion are full of problems. A lot of what he says, I can't help but dislike, just because it is either misleading or overgeneralizing. He'd make a great politician or televangelist.
This is a good example of good public speaking skills. "Get their attention" "give them a reason to care" "organize and make your points effectively" "summarize"
He has good advice about listening, but not much more than anyone who has taken speech & comm in college, or even just a decent amount of life experience, shouldn't already know.
The idea that "we are losing our listening" is complete load of rubbish.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by banshee misfortune
Re: Learning to Listen
“Reminds me of that old idea about how regional accents were going to be erased by national television (didn't happen).”
Maybe not erased, but my experience has been that they are in serious decline, at least in my corner of the planet (Southeastern USA).
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Bob himself
Re: Learning to Listen
Maybe so Bob, but that probably has more to do with urbanization than Midwestern accents on TV.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Marklar
Re: Learning to Listen
I'm definitely seeing a spreading of the "LA accent" (flat, nasal affect with rising intonation on statements, usually pronounced as if through a wad of chewing gum) throught out the northwest and the northeast, and not from people who have spent time in LA.
Oregon's accent isn't very distinctive for the most part, but here in Boston I've only heard one or two people who have the real old-school boston accent. There's lots of reference to it in local advertising, but it's not in actual use in the places I am.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
I wouldn't judge a Ted presenter on the basis of one 5 minute clip. The format is abridged, more of a snap shot opportunity to put ideas in play, less so defending one's Ph.D. dissertation.
I've presented a 2 hour program for schools and a science museum about listening and our brains on music, and that barely scratches the surface.
violamike: "The idea that "we are losing our listening" is complete load of rubbish."
Meh. Maybe, maybe not. Treasure was speaking historically, over many generations. I'm not sure anyone can say for certain whether people in Homer's time (not Mr. Simpson) were better or worse listeners than we are now. I suspect Treasure has a point and can cite historical references to back it up. I also suspect a case could be made for the opposite--that today's ubiquity and multiplicity of sources may make us more selective, discerning listeners. Which means declaring an assertion one way or the other is "a complete load of rubbish" is itself a complete load of rubbish and a sign that one is perhaps not as good a listener and "understander" as one assumes....
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
I think there are probably still some places in the world with a substantial proportion of illiterate adults having little access to the radio and living away from roads.. But if anyone wants to compare over the equivalent of many generations they had better get on with it before those Millenium Development Goals have been reached.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
Hmm, I wonder if there is a rural/urban (or recreation time spent in the natural vs built environment) split over views on this.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
"I wouldn't judge a Ted presenter on the basis of one 5 minute clip. The format is abridged, more of a snap shot opportunity to put ideas in play, less so defending one's Ph.D. dissertation."
When I first started seeing TED talks, I was impressed by the consistently high standard of the presentations that I saw and by the presenters themselves. At that time, based on what I'd seen, "TED talk" implied a serious discussion of an interesting topic, presented for the layman by a serious researcher in the field.
Since then, TED has jumped the shark, and seems to have become an infotainment organization, and based on what I'm seeing, that assumption is no longer a safe one. Being a "TED presenter" doesn't seem to convey anything more to me today than, say, "giving a lecture in a Harvard building". Well, you can hear some brilliant stuff in those halls, or you can hear that "positive pyschology" nonsense, which is apparently the most popular course offered at that school.
Note that I am not making any judgements on the clip in question - I've just got home, and haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. I'm just saying that, to me, "TED presenter" doesn't really have any juju any more.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
"I'm not sure anyone can say for certain whether people in Homer's time (not Mr. Simpson) were better or worse listeners than we are now."
I don't know about Homer, but Frits Staal's work on the sanskrit pandit tradition is worth looking at in this context.
Dig up a thing he wrote called "Revere Memory" - it's a little technical, but you can hack it.
Based on his observations of a living oral culture. Very interesting, I thought.
# Posted on August 4th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
Seems to me the presenter's thoughts are very cogent. I think his main point is that culture once demanded careful listening because of the transitory nature of information. Having the need to remember what was said is not nearly so important as it once was. After all, we no longer are being counseled to avoid sabre-tooth tigers any more.
And, we no longer entertain ourselves as we used to when radio and tv weren't around. Then we all had something entertaining we did. Now many of us can only slide DVDs into slots and otherwise provide a chance for devices to entertain us. The result: a decay in listening skills and all sorts of related "attention paying" skills. Those of us who are involved in music retain some of those skills, but none the less are a product of our environment. We can't quote big sections of poetry any more. We might know hundreds of tunes but haven't a prayer of remembering much of what was said to us concerning something else that we know we can look up.
So, our uses of our brains have changed. Our listening skills have changed. Certain things have been lost, and the presenter thinks those things are important. I think he has a point. But I also think we need to realize that we've developed many other skills we didn't have in times past too.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by cboody
Re: Learning to Listen
Jon, I agree--the overall standard of Ted Talks has declined, or been diluted.
Thanks for the Staal referral--I'll have to look him up. Sounds interesting. I've had some experience with Native storytellers who keep their tribe's oral history alive without a written source.
cboody, good points. We tend to remember stuff that's important to remember. But all our newfangled external storage technologies have trimmed that down to "stuff that's important to remember *and* that can't be stored elsewhere for ready retrieval." So it used to be important to have a headful of phone numbers of your family and friends (I still recall my childhood home phone number from 40 years ago). But now we rely on our phones' internal memory to store and retrieve that information, and, in most cases, much more of it.
I suspect that this alters how we pay attention to information in general, both aural and visual. Thanks to technology, most of what we see and hear now is disposable, at least as far as our brains are concerned. If we happen to need something again, we can probably find it in some device or on some web page....
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
It's true that technology has caused us to lose some skills, such as long-term memorization. That would go back to the advent of writing. And the phone number thing is a good point of how this has progressed: now that we don't even need to write a phone number down--just select a name from a menu--we don't memorize phone numbers like we used to.
Kids these days have trouble with cursive handwriting, telling time from analog watches, using printed reference books, etc. Because those skills aren't as needed and practiced as they used to be. Telling time from the sun, navigating by the stars, using a slide rule, etc. are all skills that went from necessity to novelty due to technological progress.
This is not a process of loss, but of change, adaptation, and progress.
A central principle of information science is to augment human intellect. The fact that we let technology take over certain things that we used to use our brains for does not just mean that we are losing something, it also means that we are freeing ourselves from certain tasks and gaining speed and productivity as a result, allowing us to do things that we could not do before.
If you want to know more about the ideas behind augmenting human intellect with information technology, this is required viewing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs
If you see technology as a negative because it causes us to lose certain abilities, then you aren't looking at the other side of things. It allows us to gain much more, and what is lost is normally lost because it is no longer necessary and important.
I still think that this has little to do with listening, in the musical sense.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Marklar
Re: Learning to Listen
Math is another good example of how technology has changed things. Why do long form division when a calculator is generally much easier and more reliable? I still think it is good to learn how it is done, just to understand the concepts and why it works.
Still, conscious listening, paying attention, social skills, developing interpersonal relationships, are all things that promote success and happiness. Modern technology can either promote this by making it easier to multitask and/or save time, or it can be distracting by spending too much time alone, staring at computer displays or tuning people out with portable music players.
There are always going to be people with good listening skills (which is the main reason I said he was full of rubbish), and everyone is capable of it, especially when something holds their interest. The difference is how many people use it and how often, and why. The difference between the two (IMHO) is probably more to do with maturity, education, good parenting, and money instead of technology. So, as with so many other problems, the answer would be to improve education and the standards of living for the lower and middle class.
Overall I do agree with a majority of what he said, and that the skills are applicable to the musical world.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by banshee misfortune
Re: Learning to Listen
I have to think that the ability to retain information inside one's skullbone is an important one, and it's one that's being eroded, and that erosion is enabled by the technologies we have available to us today.
This is not a "technology is evil" idea, it's an observation: most people can't remember dick any more, because they don't have to.
Nobody remembers a phone number any more, because their phone does it for them. Knowledge - deep, in-depth knowledge of a subject - is now looked on as a weird affectation, because you can look all that stuff up on Google or Wikipedia. Again: this is not "technology is evil", but one side effect of the technology is one that any sensible person thinks is a real problem. The technology itself is both cool and useful, but it has a side effect, and that side effect has to be reckoned with, if you're thinking about the technology at all.
Concrete example: I do some Java coaching on some of the programming boards, and there are kids who don't know the classes they're supposed to be working with, the basic classes of the language, because they have an IDE to fill in the bits for them. For non-programmers, this is exactly like someone trying to learn carpentry and being unable to remember whether the hammer is the one you use to put the nails in, or if it's the wrench. And if they guess that it's the hammer, they have no idea which of a dozen hammers in the toolbox is the one they want to use.
This doesn't mean the IDE is a Bad Thing - it can be a good thing, in the hands of someone who's got the skills to make use of it. But a novice programmer with a tool that fills in the bits for them has no immediate lash forcing them to actually know what they're doing - and so, they find that a few years in, they don't really know the libraries that they're supposed to be writing in. I see these people every day, this is not a hypothetical situation, or some dark imagining of mine. The technology is good and useful, and it enables a state of affairs which is problematic in the long term. Presumably we can keep both of these ideas in our heads at the same time.
I think a lot of this is actually a failure to take control of the change that is happening, it's a failure to adapt technology to our actual needs, and while it may be progress, it might be progress down a dead-end street.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
" Why do long form division when a calculator is generally much easier and more reliable?"
An excellent example, violamike.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
I have to disagree with both Marklar and violamike a bit. I don't think technology needs any defenders. Everyone is, or certainly should be, aware of the positive impact of technology. The question are: what kinds of impact does this have on listening carefully and retaining what we have heard. In my view the impact is huge and not without problem. Remember, we are talking generations of time here. It has certainly been a century since reading became a common skill in much of Europe and North America, and the telephone and radio have been around for nearly that long. So, yes, there will always be people with good listening skills relative to the skills common to their era, but I venture to suggest that the level of listening skills across time have decreased, and that is what is important.
It is somewhat similar to the decrease in vocabulary skills from, say 1865 to today. I just finished a book on the infamous Andersonville Prison (Confederate prison in the US Civil War). It was written be a reasonably literate soldier who had been captive there and other places and had survived. He became a newspaper writer after the war and I believe parts of the book were published as articles. What struck me, besides the story, was both the articulateness and the use of language. I don't often need a dictionary, but I used it for this book. This was a "common man" writing for the "common man." Today many folks would be unable to read the book well because they would drown in the vocabulary and the references to Shakespeare and 19th century poets. So, what has happened? Public discourse has been dumbed down, expectations on students have been relaxed and so we no longer have the vocabularies and reference points common in the past. We haven't needed them so.... One can multiply this sort of example, but the point is that something has been lost.
Similarly the music listening skills have been lost. When I was an undergrad (a long time ago!) I had to be taught the rudiments of various structural principles used in classical music and given listening examples to help me hear them in practice. A couple of generations earlier many more folks would have heard that sort of music enough so that they would have absorbed the principles and have been able to appreciate how composers used the principles...without having to study things. I'm sure similar examples can be developed in the ITM world, and indeed in any culture's music. You will now hear heavy metal or rap or whatever everywhere in the world. This is not to say those are bad musics, but they do take away from the chance to focus on the music of the culture you live in, be it "classical" or "traditional." And, without those skills those of us wanting to get involved with a music have to start from much further back. We don't have the background in listening, and we don't know how to listen as well.
Yes folks out hear are probably ahead of the curve by virtue of years of practice and involvement. But, I venture to suggest it takes folks longer and longer to get deeply involved in their chosen music. The lack of careful listening engendered by technology and the reduction in examples surrounding us simply makes it necessary for us to struggle longer.
Somewhere I suspect there are even brain use studies that support this. Anyone got those references?
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by cboody
Re: Learning to Listen
cross posted with Jon K. who probably said it better than I did...
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by cboody
Re: Learning to Listen
Well, Jon, look at it this way. The ability to store and retrieve information quickly and easily may mean that people don't need to memorize things they used to have to, but it doesn't follow that no one is using their memory anymore and everyone's brains are going to atrophy.
People still have to remember things, just different things. You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?
The IDE thing is a bad example. It may be good for beginning programmers to use a simple text editor, to force them to learn the keywords, syntax, basic classes, etc. But IDEs don't dumb down programming; for professional programmers working on large projects they are a necessity, and they increase productivity dramatically. The advent of IDEs hasn't resulted in programmers needing to remember less, they just keep you from having to pull a book off a shelf to see what methods are available on this obscure class you just ran into.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Marklar
Re: Learning to Listen
I do think that memory is something that you develop with practice. I believe that human memory is basically infinite in capacity, and what we require is the skill to use it. I'm definitely not talking about the fad for rote storage of trivia kicked off by Safran-Foer's brother's book. I'm talking about the construction of a massively-linked network of ideas, not a bunch of randomly-generated one-directional one-dimensional associations.
I just don't see people practicing this around me. Instead, people are doing their best to not have to know things. This doesn't make your brain work better!
The usual justification for this sort of thing is that by not having to remember X, we make room in the memory for Y and Z, which are somehow more important - as if memory were a finite capacity, like the metaphor of the attic from Holmes. I think Holmes was wrong: instead of "saving space for important stuff" by not remembering things every day, we make it harder to remember things.
Someone who dials their own phone numbers is more likely to remember a new one, not less likely. Someone who knows the methods of a large number of library classes is more likely to grasp a new class quickly and well, not less likely.
If I'm right in this, every memory-sparing device is actually eating away at its user's capacity to learn, unless that person is learning something else instead, and I just don't see that happening. People don't load up their heads with the important dates of nineteenth-century European history because they've been spared the effort of knowing a phone number. They don't do anything at all. And the communication tools today show this is the case. What's the hottest thing running? Twitter - a medium in which actually communicating anything beyond a triviality or a wisecrack is simply impossible - is now a required distraction for anyone looking to be "with it".
So where do we see people actually learning? What are people doing with those brains of theirs? What is occupying all of those grey cells? What mighty wonders of cognition are being unleashed by all of this saving of mental labor?
"You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?"
Remember passwords? Have you not heard of auto-completion? Every browser remembers your passwords for you!
(re: IDE's, I think I did say that an IDE can be a useful tool for someone who knows the language. The problem is that it also prevents people from being people who know the language...)
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
I'll volunteer to be the resident Luddite.
Certainly some technologies are helpful and "good," but some technologies at the very least have "bad" ramifications for humanity, or what it means to be human. I worry that we're succumbing to engineering, which more often than not does things simply because it can, even when it's in our better interest not to do those things. Biological weapons strike me as an apt example of unhinged engineering.
Not that sound recording devices are on par with weaponized anthrax.
But people like Ray Kruzweil genuinely worry me. He wants to implant nanobots in our bloodstream to augment our immune systems and memory, among other things. He loathes death and so would like nothing more than to technologically extend the human lifespan to hundreds of years. On the surface, that sounds okay--few of us embrace our mortality. Most of us enjoy life and would love to keep going as long as we're physically and mentally sound.
But imagine a world packed with 300 year-olds competing for space and resources with all the sub-200 year- old youngsters. Think we have famines and territorial battles now? Yikes!
My main concern is that we're using technology to desperately escape our own biology, and we're succeeding through biotechnology, genetic tinkering, nanorobots, and the ongoing surge of exponentially "smarter" computer intelligence, all without understanding the impact on ourselves as organisms evolved to suit our natural habitat, and without understanding the impact to this biosphere that lets us live in an otherwise harsh solar system.
Today, the pace of technological change outstrips our ability to comprehend and manage it. Soon (in generational terms), we'll lose control. We won't be able to anticipate most of the effects and side effects, and won't be able to stop the ripple of momentum.
So maybe Treasure's ideas about listening offer one way to get back in touch with our basic nature, as mammals, as organisms shaped by 200,000 years of natural selection so that we're well adapted to our environment. Rather than endlessly reshaping our environment, adapting it to us.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
"So where do we see people actually learning? What are people doing with those brains of theirs? What is occupying all of those grey cells? What mighty wonders of cognition are being unleashed by all of this saving of mental labor?
"You don't have to remember phone numbers anymore, but now you do have to remember passwords and PIN numbers, right?"
Remember passwords? Have you not heard of auto-completion? Every browser remembers your passwords for you! "
Well, there were plenty of people who didn't remember phone numbers before these things were stored in the phone. They used to write it down in a book, often keeping it beside the big bakelite monstrosity with a dial on it - that thing you had to put a finger in and it whirred back. Took ages to dial a number outside the UK.
I'm one of those who could and did memorise phone numbers. Many are still there from years back, and I still memorise new ones. For some strange reason, I can't memorise cell phone numbers. Not sure if it's the different format or just a subconscious rejection of new-fangled things.
Watching my daughter (she is 6) learning at home and school is heartening. She wouldn't touch a computer for ages. We had to open up her Disney and Barbie pages for her and do all the mousework. Then one day a peer at the nursery (she was 4) 'showed her how to do it' (I reckon she actually knew but 'allowed' her friend to teach her). She came back home and could do everything. Switch it on, type her name, open up the web pages she wanted, etc. She can work out how to perform tasks on the thing at an amazing rate, while her granny is still struggling to open up a browser. She had been watching us using the computer and absorbing it all - along with that capacity for learning how to use new-fangled thingies.
She can also tell people what it is that lurks within that "cuckoo spit" on the stems of plants - that one day it will be a froghopper, jumping from plant to plant. What kind of animals the buzzards in the sky prey on. Her reading skills are developing at an incredible rate.
The point I'm making is that a lot of this "kids of today don't know how to learn" stuff is just things you have to say as a member of the Old Farts' Club. Sure, there are skills that no longer need to be learned, so they are avoided. It doesn't mean brains will become addled and cease to be employed for anything other than pushing buttons. Different things will be 'stored in the database' - things that are relevant (my daughter is still refusing to touch a phone, but it is quite possible that she will remember phone numbers when she starts using one - some of her peers do).
I was involved in a conversation with fellow Old Farts' Club members some time back concerning kids using text messages. The usual topics arose "kids can't spell these days", "look at the dreadful abbreviations they are using" etc. Somebody pointed out (a professional guitarist who is also an English teacher) that "back in the good old days" a lot of these kids simply wouldn't be getting involved with reading and writing at all, except when they had to in school. Now they are actually using the written word to communicate (albeit in an adapted language). Not quite the regression that it is made out to be. Kids are still using the grey matter. As I struggle to remember what I was planning to do five minutes ago (though I can still remember landline numbers) and brush another fallen white hair off my clothing, I still question the membership requirements of the Old Farts' Club.
Maybe things are changing, but not necessarily for the worse. A lot of it is our inabilty to adapt to, or accept the change.
I really dread being the old fart that used to bemoan the "long hair" and thing of that ilk when I was growing up.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Weejie
Re: Learning to Listen
Great discussion.
This is thesession.org at its best.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's actually a symptom of the ever increasing trend towards soundbites and simplicity and the dismissal of nuance by the modern media.
A few thoughts which jumped into my head:
I think the trend for brevity and simplicity in English written work has been ongoing for a generation or more and has a lot to do with the way writing is taught to kids and the kind of writing which people are most frequently exposed to -- newspapers, magazines, and so on. When I was in school I was taught to avoid obscure vocabulary, complicated sentences, and if you could say something in one sentence, then don't bloody well use three. There was even a sign on the classroom wall in one high school English class which stated "Don't use a long word when a diminutive one will do." I haven't read a single 18th or 19th century piece of writing, and that's not novels; that is mostly stuff like newspaper articles, court papers, and mental asylum case notes, which employed these "bare-bones" principles to any degree. They're all a bit like the Andersonville Prison narrative cboody mentioned. That's how people wrote.
Here's a very short article from the Inverness Journal in 1830 which I think illustrates, in less than 200 words, the syntactic complexity of "everyday" writing, a style which you don't find in journalism now:
"Our readers will recollect that John Smith, from Stornoway, was in September last placed at the bar of the Circuit Court here, accused of having murdered Donald Smith, a young man belonging to Stornoway, with a spade. Smith’s intellect was always considered weak; and two Doctors, who were examined before the Justiciary Court, swore that in their opinion, he was totally incapable of instructing his Counsel to conduct his case – in short, that he was insane. The Court therefore ordered him to be conveyed back to the jail of Tain, there to remain subject to future orders of the High Court of Justiciary. The unfortunate maniac, however, became lately much indisposed, probably in consequence of his confinement, and died last week. His intellect since his imprisonment appeared to be totally deranged and he did not seem to be aware of the enormity of the crime of which he was accused; but when the murder was alluded to he was sometimes heard to say in Gaelic, “I did not kill him.”"
Technology like Twitter and text messaging enhances the brevity of people's writing but stylistically, things have been going that way for a while. No one wants to see all those semi-colons, dashes, and dependent clauses.
That's obviously a total tangent from the listening issue.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if skills atrophy, or vanish. I'm a bit useless at reading an analogue clock and even more useless at long division but my mother only figured out how to attach a file to an email last year; however she can read an analogue clock and do long division. With these sorts of skill sets, I don't think it greatly matters if you can do them or not, at least not until that moment comes when you have to do long division by hand or you ask your boyfriend what time it is and he just shows you his analogue watch and doesn't say anything.
What is more concerning, however, and what some of you guys are saying, is the way technology seems to be eroding our attention skills and even our social skills. Quite a few studies have come out which show how much multitasking impairs cognitive ability (hmmm... how many windows do I have open on my browser as I write this post... um, three) and managing a constant stream of media, flicking from one thing to another, means people's ability to focus on one thing suffers greatly. The other day we were listening to a radio program (online) and I was having a hard time sitting and just listening, and not fussing about with other browser windows. It was a bit scary. I used to listen to A Prairie Home Companion when I was a kid, and I was able to listen and not have the compulsion to be doing something else at the same time.
I think you have accept and hold in your head the seemingly opposing ideas that technological changes are neutral (i.e. analogue v. digital clocks), positive (i.e. the ease and cheapness of long distance communication), and negative (i.e. erosion of attentive and listening skills).
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Learning to Listen
I still haven't listened to it again to check up on some things.
Reading that paragraph from 1830 out loud it is possible to use tone of voice to make the dependant clauses work. It sounds a bit old fashioned but it works better than in text. It needs at least one extra pause/comma. I wonder if we have started writing less like how we talk and so less like what we hear in conversation.
I have tried sometimes to post short extracts from the interviews on the Folktrax cassettes to highlight what the old timers said about what they did. Working out how to punctuate them to carry the sense of the spoken word was really hard.
If had spoken it I would have worded that last paragraph differently. In conversation, as when listening, I would only had one chance.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
... would only have had .... [which illustrates something]
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
I now have listened again. I thought so. Apart from saying right at the beginning that we only retain 15% of what we hear he was not talking about memory, about remembering, he was talking about understanding, hearing what was meant, at the time. Which was what Will wrote about in the OP. The discussion went interestingly off-topic as discussions and bar-room conversations do. But were we broadcasting what came to mind rather than listening to the talk and the thoughts in the OP ?
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
...retain 25% .. [typo, honest]
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
LOL, David, how do we know you just weren't listening and retaining well?
The memory issue comes into it because if you're not listening well and understanding the stimulus in the first place, you won't have any useful information to retrieve (except perhaps that you'll want to listen better next time).
When I was in my senior year in college, a beautiful co-ed classmate of mine asked me if we could study together for an upcoming test, using my notes. But I didn't have any notes to study from--I just paid attention during class, thought through what we were learning in the moment, and retained it. The look she gave me was a mix of disbelief and apprehension bordering on fear. My listening and retention skills didn't help me think quick enough in the moment to be her study partner sans notes and she scurried back to her friends like I was Bobo the Three-Headed Boy.
I simply never got the habit of taking notes, all through grade school and university. It was more efficient and natural to simply pay attention in the first place. Retaining and retrieving information/knowledge follows attention and intention. This approach worked well for me. I was an A student through high school, graduated a year early, and finished college with a 3.9 GPA. Not bragging, just offering anecdotal evidence that listening well is a useful skill that many people don't use to its potential.
I have a poster in my teaching room that says "Listening is active, attentive, specific, and responsive." I think that combo makes for good listening and so on to understanding. Works a treat for music, and for communicating with others, too.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
Will's comments are interesting. I too depended largely on my listening skills to get through schooling. I grad school I took notes, but mostly to keep myself focused on listening. I seldom if ever looked at them except to remind myself of the lecture. Under the pressure of the exam I could often recall sections of the lecture. Oddly enough though this same skill made it easy for me to absorb good sized hunks of classical music it never carried over into translating what I hear to either notation or playing. I've had to struggle to build that bridge.
Oh! Will, I had a similar invite from a co-ed. I went over. Nothing happened. Probably because I was too dense to understand what she had in mind when she remarked that no one would be home at all that evening....
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by cboody
Re: Learning to Listen
Same here (to Will and cboody) regarding notes and relying on either understanding at the time or retaining enough to sort it out in my head later, often with some reading. I can also identify with Jerone's (are you around ?) wanting to synthesise and set his new knowledge out clearly in his posts here. Not that I usually wrote it down, more just to get the satisfaction of getting it straight in my head.
But nothing in the way I learned was relevant to music or physical skills like Will''s juggling (my sibling got those genes) . I am only making progress with that later in life and it's a new way of approaching learning. So that aspect of listening in itself is not related to music for me. I think when I do something similar to Treasure's 'mixing' it is both learning to discriminate within the sound but also setting up the filters and patterns to match for later use. Reminds me of listening to the dawn chorus with an expert and trying to pick out from the mix the sounds that were pointed out when first heard.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
I'm just pondering over the invites...
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by David50
Re: Learning to Listen
LOL, cboody, us nerds think (or misthink) alike!
David (and Jerone), I find that teaching others has been a tremendous help for my own understanding of listening to and playing music because I have to explain and articulate what I think I do and know. That process of thinking about it all and putting it into words and specific demonstrations is, in a way, a process of learning to listen to myself, both as I play music, and as I think and talk about it. It creates an ongoing feedback (or feedforward) loop that continues to improve my ability to listen and understand music. I'd be less of a musician if I weren't also a teacher.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
Some good points here.
I'm the first to admit that technology always has a dark side, but I really don't buy that it's hurting the arts, because I don't really see a decline in the quality of music, literature, etc. over the past few decades. If anything, the arts have gained a lot of valuable new tools.
If you really want to worry about where technology is taking us, worry about privacy. The loss of privacy is the chief danger that technology poses right now. This will become a huge issue over the next decade. Trust me, it's already gone further than most people can imagine.
There is a tech boom going on in data mining right now, driven by social networking, which is really just a way to get people to willingly hand over personal information to private companies.
Your private info is worth money to companies, and most people are giving it away. And once you give it up, it's out there forever and you have no control. Oh, and (at least in the US) the government can access this data pretty much at will.
Imagine what it would be like if every place you've gone, every post you've written, every purchase you've made, etc. were public knowledge. It's coming. This data is already being aggregated so that it can all be tied to you. Your data will not only be sold to companies and made available to governments, it will be available to anyone for a fee.
This is just a glimpse into what is coming over the next few years:
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/why-i-was-banned-google-and-how-i-redeemed-my?t51hb
Oh, and if you use your real name as your handle here, Google has everything you've posted with that name, and is aggregating this with every other bit of information that it can tie to you. Which is more data than you might think, if you use email, online banking, read news on the Web, etc. It's not just kids on Facebook who are at risk.
# Posted on August 5th 2011 by Marklar
Re: Learning to Listen
"I'd be less of a musician if I weren't also a teacher."
Amen to that. 50 years of teaching have made me much better at explaining what should happen than I am able to do it!!
# Posted on August 6th 2011 by cboody
Re: Learning to Listen
Those links are really tip of the iceberg stuff.
There's a fun and scary and pretty good book called "Little Brother", written by Cory Doctorow. Don't be surprised if you have to go to the "young adult" section to find it - it is in fact a young adult novel, but it's still the best thing on right now.
As for using real names here or elsewhere on the web, that's a decision I made for myself for a very good reason, and I wish more people would do it. Read Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect", if you want to know why.
(I made the decision to avoid anonymity long before I Zimbardo wrote the book, but he did his experiments long before I made the decision, so we'll call it a tie)
# Posted on August 6th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning to Listen
I've always assumed that anything I've ever done online--not just posts--is public. You'd have to be naive to believe otherwise.
I've seen first hand how technology is hurting this art--people forgoing learning a tune from the living, breathing musician right in front of them, and instead turning on a recording device. That depersonalizes the exchange and misses a central point (human interaction, craic) to playing this music. Already we have a generation or two who get most of their tunes from recordings, not straight from other puddles of dna. I suspect this diminishes the sense of community, and that can't bode well for the community of musicians who play this music.
# Posted on August 6th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning to Listen
cboody, I've always said I'm a better teacher than I am a player....
# Posted on August 6th 2011 by Will Harmon