Of all of the changes you can make to improve your musical ear, the most important one is to practice active listening. Instead of just letting the music “enter one ear and leave the other,” active listening requires that you make a concerted effort to pay attention, to ask questions, and to be fully engaged with every moment of the music. This means that instead of music being a blur of sounds, you begin to be able to pick out the different parts of the music and identify them. This process is often much faster because once you’re actively engaged, your brain starts to adjust right away, and you can make progress in a matter of days that used to take a matter of weeks of ear training exercises.
To get started with this practice, choose a short section of a piece you like, and listen to it in a different way each day. One day, listen just to the melody – imagine the piece is a single voice singing to you. Another day, listen just to the chordal part, and observe the way in which it informs the melody. A third day, listen just to the rhythm – attend to the beat, to any syncopation, and to the way in which accents are used to shape the feel. With each day’s focused listening, you will begin to be able to internalize the different components of the piece, and the next time you hear it you will be able to pick them out more clearly. And as you repeat this process, each component will begin to jump out at you – the music will begin to sound like separate voices engaged in a conversation.
One of the great things about active listening is that you don’t need anything to do it, except your curiosity and your attention. And even just 5–10 minutes a day, if you do it with full attention, is worth more than hours of passive listening. Often you find that even in songs you know by heart, there is a dissonant that is held, or a bass line that moves in an unexpected way, or a rhythmic motif that is displaced. And these realizations are encouraging because they demonstrate that your ear can already hear more than you think. The effect is mildly intoxicating because these realizations increase your attachment to the music.
Over time, this process of active listening becomes automatic. When you hear a progression you know is going to change, you anticipate the chord change. When you know a rhythm is going to start, you anticipate the rhythmic phrase. When you know a composer wrote something in a certain style, you anticipate the way the song will sound. This ability to anticipate is the ultimate goal of having a developed ear. It enables you to play songs by ear, improvise, or even communicate musically without speaking. It even permeates the way you experience your day-to-day life, as everything from the sounds of the street to the way people speak to the sounds of birds chirping contain intervals and chord changes.
Ultimately, learning to listen actively isn’t about cultivating new skills, it’s about unearthing dormant ones. The musical ear is not a talent exclusive to a select minority, but a dormant skill that can be developed with directed use. If you stick to the exercise long enough, you’ll discover that the music changes. Overnight. And this isn’t because your ear has improved, it’s because you’re finally hearing the music the way it wants to be heard.