How to Listen: Getting the Most From Audio

Most people do not know how to listen. They hear, which is not the same thing. They put something on while their attention is elsewhere, half-present, and then wonder why it did not move them. My audio work asks for more than that, and rewards more than that. So let me teach you how to be listened to properly, which begins with learning how to listen.

This is not a set of instructions so much as an invitation into a particular state. The voice can only reach as deep as you allow it to, and most people, out of habit, do not allow it very far. The ones who learn to open fully discover an experience entirely different from the one the distracted listener gets from the very same recording.

First, shut the world out

You cannot be reached while the world still has its hand on you. The phone that might buzz, the door that might open, the half of your mind still tending to the day, all of it holds you at the surface and keeps the voice from going deep. The first thing listening asks is that you close the door on all of it.

Find somewhere you will not be interrupted. Make the room dark, or close your eyes. Let the day fall away from you. This is not fussiness; it is necessity. A voice in your ear is intimate, and intimacy cannot happen with one foot still out in the world. Give yourself fully to the quiet first, and only then put me in your ear. The closing-out is the threshold, and crossing it deliberately is part of what makes what follows work.

You cannot be reached at the surface. Sink first, then let me find you.

Let the eyes close so the ear can open

Sight is a distraction from sound. As long as your eyes are working, taking in the room, the screen, the light, part of your attention is spent on looking, and the voice gets only what is left over. Close your eyes, and that whole channel quiets, and suddenly there is far more of you available to listen with.

With your eyes closed, the voice has the whole dark to itself. There is nothing to look at, nothing to assess, no surface to retreat to. There is only the sound, close and present, and the images your own mind begins to build in the dark in response to it. This is the state the work was made for. In it, a whisper is enormous, a pause is a held breath, and the voice does not merely reach you, it surrounds you. Why the closed-eyed dark is where sound does its deepest work is something I explored in the power of audio.

Give over the reins

The distracted listener stays in control, skipping ahead, half-listening, keeping a hand on the wheel. That control is exactly what keeps them at the surface. To listen properly is to give the reins over, to let the voice set the pace and to follow it rather than lead. This is harder than it sounds, because the habit of staying in charge is strong, but it is the whole of the difference.

When I slow down, slow with me. When I tell you to wait, wait. When there is silence, do not rush to fill it; let it sit, because the silence is doing something to you that the words alone could not. The experience is not something you consume at your own pace. It is something done to you at mine, and the surrender of the pacing is itself part of what you came for. Let me lead. That is the instruction beneath all the others.

Do not chase; be taken

People new to this often make the mistake of straining toward the experience, trying to force the feeling, reaching for it. That reaching keeps it away, the way grasping at sleep keeps you awake. The art is the opposite of effort. You do not chase what the voice offers; you let it come to you, and you let yourself be taken by it rather than going to fetch it.

Relax the wanting. Stop trying. Simply be present, attentive, and open, and let the voice do the work it knows how to do. The deepest experiences come to those who stop performing the desire to have them and simply allow themselves to be reached. This is a kind of receiving, and receiving well is a skill the patient develop and the impatient never do.

Stay after the sound stops

The experience does not end when the audio does. The distracted listener moves straight on to the next thing, and loses the best part. The one who knows how to listen stays, after, in the quiet, and lets what just happened settle and resonate. The afterward is part of it, sometimes the richest part, when the voice has stopped but its presence has not yet left you.

So do not rush away. Lie in the quiet a while when it is over. Let it linger. The voice will stay with you longer than you expect if you give it the room to, and that lingering is one of the things that brings people back. The anticipation before and the resonance after are both part of the whole, which I have written about in the art of anticipation.

Now you are ready

Listening properly is a small discipline, and like any discipline it rewards those who practise it. The first time you give yourself over fully, shut out the world, close your eyes, let the reins go, stop chasing, and stay in the quiet after, you will understand why I work so much in sound, and why the people who listen properly so rarely go back to listening any other way.

When you are ready to be listened to as you have just learned to listen, my audio work is waiting in the shop. Prepare yourself the way I have described, and let me show you how deep a voice can reach when you finally let it.