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LIFELONG LISTENING: ENHANCING THE INTUITIVE WAYS WE LISTEN TO MUSIC
Robert E. Dunn Case Western Reserve University Copyright © Robert E. Dunn
Jean Bamberger’s (1982) study of children’s representations of rhythm suggested that they tend to depict learned rhythms in two categories of rhythmic drawings, figural and metric. In figural drawings, children try to translate their experience of rhythmic movement into drawings of shapes or figures. These figural drawings may contain generalities about rhythmic information but are not exact. They also contain general contextual information about groupings, or, one might say, children’s intuitive responses to how the groupings make musical sense. In fully metric drawings, which correspond to traditional music notation, only specific metric information is presented, usually obscuring grouping ideas. As Hargreaves (1986) summed up Bamberger’s point of view, “figural expression comes nearer to capturing the intuitive, ‘musical sense’ of a piece” (p. 99).
It is this idea of capturing the intuitive musical sense of a piece of music that intrigues me, not only as part of a specific listening event, but as a normal part of experiencing music, a lifelong skill to be cherished and developed. For the last few years, I have been investigating the notion of “creative listening” through subject-created visual representations, or figural maps (c.f., Dunn, 1997, 2000, 2002). Lately, my thoughts about the subject have led me to consider using the term “intuitive listening” as a larger term that includes the creative aspects of the listening process. In this paper, I will propose ten characteristics of intuitive listening, share examples of student-created figural maps and their comments about creating them, and discuss whether the maps and comments support the ten characteristics of intuitive listening.
Ten Characteristics of Intuitive Listening
In an earlier article (Dunn, 1997), I examined conceptual writings about a listener’s creative involvement in music listening experiences. I propose the following ten characteristics of intuitive listening based on those writings, and my own research and experience.
Characteristic 1. Intuitive listening is an active process involving unique cognitive and affective responses to music that extends beyond listeners’ technical understanding of the music. When we ‘just hear’ music, it goes ‘in one ear and out the other.’ In intuitive listening, however, the mind actively and constantly creates mental musical images, informed by feeling, unique to every individual. Intuitive listening operates beyond words—we know what we experience in music, but it is beyond the realm of words to describe explicitly what we feel.
Characteristic 2. Intuitive listening allows individuals to find themselves in the music, to become co-creators of the musical experience. As Mursell (1943) wrote, “The successful listener enters into the music, possesses it, is possessed by it, and so is inspired and enabled to make it for himself” (p. 170).
Characteristic 3. Intuitive listening involves objective, subjective, and imaginative response. The intuitive listening process combines these kinds of responses to create a holistic listening experience. They combine differently with each repeated hearing, making each experience qualitatively different to some degree.
Characteristic 4. Intuitive listening is directly affected by individual feelings that assist in creating connections and meanings within the music, and between the music and life experiences. We personally identify ourselves with the sounds—somehow we find they express our own feelings, ideas and attitudes. Consider the teen who listens to different music dependent on the mood he or she is in or wants to feel.
Characteristic 5. Intuitive listening may involve extra-musical responses prompted by the music or affective response to it. As we co-create our music listening experiences, we often find associations beyond the notes that become part of the overall experiencing of a musical work, and part of recalling a given music listening experience.
Characteristic 6. Intuitive listening involves ‘thinking in sound.’ Just as composers and performers must ‘think in sound’ as they imagine and make real the music they create, intuitive listeners think in sound as they make the listening experience their own, again, functioning beyond words but surely in the realm of musical thinking. When a song gets stuck in your head, where some aspect of the music is reexperienced after the fact, you are thinking in sound.
Characteristic 7. Intuitive listening involves reflection-in-action—that is, perceiving the music as it happens, creating expectations of what may happen, reflecting on what has happened, and interacting affectively with these perceptions. This flux of experiencing is constant, inseparable from the other aspects of noticing and responding.
Characteristic 8. Intuitive listening enables us to create holistic, mental representations of the music, the creative product of intuitive listening. Such mental representations create a holistic framework that becomes our vehicle for remembering and making sense of a given listening experience. In repeated listenings, the mental framework allows us to recognize the piece, to recall objective, subjective, imaginative, and feelingful information about it, and to make adjustments and additions to the framework with each new encounter.
Characteristic 9. Intuitive listening is an authentic, lifelong human process. Engaging in listening to music in a way that is personally meaningful is a lifelong part of being human, apparently beginning in the womb (e.g., Lecanuet, 1996; Trevarthen, 1999-2000). It happens without formal musical instruction.
Characteristic 10. Intuitive listening can be influenced by education. An important goal of music education is to enhance each individual’s ability to interact meaningfully with music over a lifetime. We know that music instruction makes a difference in what people know about and can do with music. We assume this is true as far as intuitive listening is concerned as well.
The last point, that intuitive listening can be influenced by education, is of most importance to music educators and others interested in human experiencing. How that can best be achieved is not certain. Internal structuring of music allows listeners to capture some essences of the musical experience in a mental image or ‘product.’ One’s personal experiences, understanding of musical elements, familiarity with a genre, and creative involvement during active listening mediate what is heard/felt, and therefore directly affects what is remembered and recorded in that mental structure. Examining a trace of those mental structures may lead to a better understanding of the intuitive listening process. Figural mapping, as mentioned in the introduction, presents interesting possibilities for this exploration.
An Ongoing Study
Purpose
In an effort to gain some insight into the intuitive listening process, I have been engaged in an ongoing study. The purpose of this study was to present subjects with a problem-solving listening task requiring them to visually represent in a figural map what they heard in a musical excerpt, and to examine their visual representations and their verbal responses to the task to see if any of the ten proposed characteristics of intuitive listening were confirmed.
For this study, a figural map involved a visual representation of an individual’s intuitive, musical sense of the piece. The intent of this style of mapping was to capture the figural musical gesture of each phrase rather than specific metric and pitch information. The lines may be similar to the trace of an expressive conductor’s conducting pattern with a few metric details. Information encoded in the figural maps may include groupings, motives, form, energy, and dynamics. Such maps can be found in the work of Richards (1977) and Atterbury and Richardson (1995). In addition, I have had extensive experience in using such maps in general music listening activities with children and adults (e.g., Dunn, 1994, 1997). When a figural map is performed, or ‘traced,’ the person tracing the map places the tip of the index finger on the beginning of the map and, as the music progresses, traces the figural patterns as the corresponding musical events unfold.
Subjects
The subjects of this ongoing study have been more than 300 undergraduate students in a non-music major course called “Introduction to Music: The Listening Experience 1” that I have taught over the last 9 years. The purpose of this course was to help students develop their music listening and analytic skills through various activities and assignments involving the exploration of basic elements of music.
By self-report, approximately 80% of the students have had some formal instrumental or vocal/choral musical experience in their lives. Note reading ability varied greatly, from no ability (approximately 20%) to high ability (approximately 25%).
Preparation
To give the reader an idea of the approach to intuitive listening employed in the course, some of the introductory activities will be outlined here. Throughout the course, it was stressed that listening to music is a personal experience. While there might be some immutable characteristics where agreement may exist between listeners, there could be a variety of ways to listen to and mentally structure a piece of music. Subjects were encouraged to stop looking for the ‘right’ answer, and look for their own thoughtful solutions, solutions that worked for them, solutions they were able to share and discuss. In short, students were encouraged to engage in critical thinking.
Subjects were introduced to figural mapping in the following order: (1) watching the instructor trace an existing map (Richards, 1977, p. 107: Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, third movement) as they listened to the music; (2) discussing what they noticed in the map; (3) tracing the map along with the instructor while listening; (4) after being given individual copies of the map, circling the parts of the map that “did not work for them” as they listened again; (5) through repeated listenings, creating their own visual musical gestures to replace those parts that did not work for them; (6) seeing/hearing one other short map produced by the instructor, and (7) listening to short phrases of three other musical examples and experimenting with trying to map these excerpts. In steps 5 and 7, subjects were asked to draw their mapping figures on the board and trace them with the music, giving all an opportunity to see that there were as many ways to approach this mapping task as there were persons; there was not one “right” way to map a melodic figure. All the examples were classical music.
Methodology
The listening task required the subjects to use visual representations to create a figural map of an excerpt from Delibes’ “Waltz” from Coppelia. A recording of the first ninety-five measures, one minute and 40 seconds in length, was provided for each subject. You can listen to the excerpt by clicking on this link: “Waltz” from Coppelia audio”. As you listen, you may want to imagine how you might map this piece.
The assignment was made on a Thursday and subjects were required to present their maps on the following Tuesday. No direction was given as to the amount of time they were to spend. The only stipulation was that they should feel that the map accurately represented what they heard and felt in the music, and that they needed to put the map on a posterboard large enough to be seen from the back of the class.
On the day of the presentations, subjects put their maps on the walls of the classroom prior to class. Before any subjects shared their maps, they were asked to write a few sentences about their experiences doing the mapping assignment. Then subjects took turns tracing their maps for the class. After the maps were shared, all subjects took a turn at trying to trace six other subjects’ maps by moving around the room to the next map in line each time the musical example was repeated. At the conclusion of this, they were asked to record a few more sentences about their responses to seeing/tracing other subjects’ maps.
The verbal responses were transcribed in two general groupings: comments about the individual mapping experience and comments about others’ maps. The comments were then examined and grouped into similar categories for further analysis.
Results
Selected Figural Maps
Three maps will be presented here as representations of the types of maps encountered so far. Subjects will be labeled A, B, and C. I have provided QuickTime videos of me tracing the three maps they created.
SUBJECT A
The map above shows Subject A’s map for the Waltz. You may want to play the piece (listen) and see if you can figure out how the map would be traced before you watch the video. Click on this link to see Map A being traced. Subject A was confident in the presentation of her map. It was easy for me to correlate the music with the individual figures she traced.
SUBJECT B
Subject B also presented a clear map (above), quite different in character. Most interesting in her map is the line that works from the bottom of the map arching upward on the right side to lead to the beginning of the map for the recapitulation of the A section. (listen or see).
SUBJECT C
A quick glance at Subject C’s map shows a completely different approach to the music based on extra-musical ideas (listen or see). As he traced the map with the music, the story unfolded of an inline skater or bicyclist (both possibilities are indicated in the map) traveling to a high top circus tent, diving off a high diving board, splashing into a pool, and being taken by ambulance to a hospital. Every line on the map clearly matched musical events as he traced it, as much as Subject A and B’s maps did. The addition of the story brought a totally different listening experience for me as I watched.
Written Responses
Subjects’ written responses to the task indicated that they were cognitively engaged in the task, revealing strategies that came into play as they listened and translated what they heard into a map:
Several subjects mentioned that figural mapping succeeded in capturing the essence of their mental conception of the excerpt; for example:
Subjects were asked to comment after watching other class members trace their maps and trying to trace the maps of others. Comments were made regarding differences between what they themselves heard and others’ mental conceptions/maps:
Discussion and Conclusions
The results of this ongoing study indicated that the problem-solving listening task used here may be useful in studying the intuitive listening process more in depth. The data also appeared to confirm some of the ten characteristics of intuitive listening proposed earlier. I will address each in turn.
Characteristic 1. Intuitive listening is an active process involving unique cognitive and affective responses to music that extends beyond listeners’ technical understanding of the music. The figural maps the subjects generated were each unique, shown by their own words to be the result of active, cognitive interactions with the music. The maps were quite sophisticated in showing specifics and generalities about form, melody, rhythm, groupings, and so on, despite the level of formal musical experience.
Characteristic 2. Intuitive listening allows individuals to find themselves in the music, to become co-creators of the musical experience. The variety in the maps indicated that music may indeed be co-created by the listener. An individual has a great impact on what is heard and how the music is represented mentally and visually. While there were some commonalities in the maps, differences were numerous. The verbal comments confirmed the individual wrestling that went on as participants listened and worked to create a map of what they heard.
Characteristic 3. Intuitive listening involves objective, subjective, and imaginative response. The maps and the comments confirm that there are objective and subjective influences simultaneously at work. Imagination is certainly involved in taking a mental image and translating it into a visual image that “looked right”.
Characteristic 4. Intuitive listening is directly affected by individual feelings that assist in creating connections and meanings within the music, and between the music and life experiences. The verbal data were especially helpful to confirm that individual feelings assist in creating connections, in finding one’s self in the sounds.
Characteristic 5. Intuitive listening may involve extra-musical responses prompted by the music or affective response to it. We may take Subject C’s map of the roller blade story as an indication that extra-musical responses may be involved in intuitive listening. We can see that he found something in the music that led him to create a story, complete with beginning, development and an ending (be it as it may, in a hospital!).
Characteristic 6. Intuitive listening involves ‘thinking in sound.’ Several comments indicated that students were thinking in sound as they worked to transform their inner perceptual structuring of the piece into a visual representation that matched what they heard/felt.
Characteristic 7. Intuitive listening involves reflection-in-action—that is, perceiving the music as it happens, creating expectations of what may happen, reflecting on what has happened, and interacting affectively with these perceptions. The verbal data gives some insight into the reflection-in-action process, but not much more than hints. Much more will need to be done on the intuitive process; perhaps protocol analysis would be useful here.
Characteristic 8. Intuitive listening enables us to create holistic, mental representations of the music, the creative product of creative listening. The intuitive listening process, in this case, allowed subjects to create holistic, visual representations that seemed to them to match the inner mental representations they created as they listened, some to a better self-reported degree than others.
Characteristic 9. Intuitive listening is an authentic, lifelong human process. It appeared that the subjects were able to intuitively transfer mental images created in music listening into visual images, despite level of formal musical education. That all were able to achieve success to some degree appears to support the assertion that intuitive listening is an authentic, natural process. Much more needs to be done in this area, however.
Characteristic 10. Intuitive listening can be influenced by education. Some of the written responses indicated a change in the way some of the students interacted musically with this piece over the course of creating this map. My experience with hundreds of students in these mapping tasks during each 16-week class indicates that great leaps can occur in one’s ability to engage music in a holistic, imaginative, creative way.
Mapping seems to be an effective way to engage students in intuitive listening. Since we cannot lay the mind open to examine how intuitive listening occurs, mapping also seems a promising way to gain insight into the intuitive listening process. There is enough evidence regarding each of the ten proposed characteristics of intuitive listening to merit further study.
That music captures the imagination and attention of human beings is certain. How we engage in the music holistically may be, as suggested here, an intuitive process, complex, yet inherent in our humanness, a lifelong part of our musical lives. As those who work with lifelong learners, enhancing each person’s ability to intuitively engage in musical experience should be one of our primary goals, whether in listening or any other aspect of musical pursuit. Continuing study needs to be done to discover how to more effectively do so.
References
Bamberger, J. (1982). Revisiting children’s drawings of simple rhythms: A function for reflection-in-action. In S. Strauss and R. Stavy (Eds.), U-shaped behavioral growth (pp. 191-226). New York: Academic Press.
Atterbury, B., & Richardson, C. (1995). The experience of teaching general music. New York: NY: McGraw-Hill.
Dunn, R. E. (2002). Does it help when we add visuals or movement to music learning experiences? Triad, 69 (4), 48-49.
Dunn, R. E. (1997). Creative thinking and music listening. Research Studies in Music Education (Special issue on creativity), 8, 42-45
Dunn, R. E. (2000). Stop, look, listen and move: Children, perceptual modalities and music listening. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 142, 80
Dunn, R. (1994). Perceptual modalities in music listening among third-grade students. (Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, 1994). Dissertation Abstracts International, 56, 858A.
Hargreaves, D.J. (1986). The developmental psychology of music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lecanuet, J.P. (1996). Prenatal auditory experience. In I. Deličge & J. A. Sloboda (eds.), Musical beginnings: Origins and development of musical competence( pp. 3-34). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mursell, J. (1943). Music in American schools. New York: Silver Burdett.
Richards, M. H. (1977). Aesthetic foundations for thinking, Part 3. Portola Valley, CA: Richards Institute of Music education and Research.
Trevarthen, C. (1999-2000). Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse; Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication [Special issue], Musicae Scientiae, 155-199. |
