Different Ways to Listen to Music
An important aspect of learning how to play an instrument is to listen to music; the two go hand in hand. When you learn how to play a piece of music, you begin to understand more about it, the structure, the emotion, maybe an underlining story. All of these points are really useful to keep in mind when listening to other music too. Being able to describe a piece of music I think is very valuable and helps people connect with it even more and also how to interpret the music too.
One great exercise to try when listening to any kind of music is to focus on listening to one instrument at a time, narrow your listening ears to follow that specific instrument throughout the song. It could be the bass throughout a pop song, or the wind instruments in an orchestral piece. Sometimes when listening to music we don’t pay attention to certain instruments that aren’t playing the main melody that we sing along to. This exercise gets you thinking about how important all parts of the song work together to create certain feeling and grooves. Maybe even try to sing along with the instrument’s melody or clap the rhythm they are playing. This exercise helps us to open up our ears to understand more about what we’re listening to and can help us discover new kinds of music that we might not have connected with before.