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"Deep Listening" and Classical Music: How to Develop Your Ear Over Time


Your body already knows how to listen to music. Before you even exited the womb, you already responded to your mother's internal bodily sounds, voices, and other sound stimuli. Music educators have long understood what neuroscience now confirms. We experience music in multiple ways: kinesthetically, emotionally, spatially, intellectually.


Deep listening, put simply, refers to total engagement with the music. A full-bodied, multi-dimensional way of experiencing sound. This is active engagement rather than passive appreciation. It requires practice, but the practice itself transforms how you perceive, process, and respond to sound.


About Me



Hi! I'm Kayla Collingwood, founder of Sound Garden. I am a classical singer, educator, and creator with over a decade of experience working with voice, music, and embodied expression.


Alongside traditional singing tuition, I offer Classical Music Immersion sessions and workshops. These guided listening experiences help you to understand and engage with what you are hearing!


Active vs Passive Listening



There is a place for ambient listening. Music can be a companion to other activities, creating atmosphere without demanding attention. Deep listening is something else entirely. It requires bringing your full attention to the sonic experience.


Think of it this way. You can glance at a Jackson Pollock painting and see paint splatters, or you can spend time with it and begin to perceive rhythm, density, energy, the artist's gestural language. The painting has not changed. Your quality of attention has.

Passive hearing is sound that happens to you. Active listening is sound you engage with intentionally. The shift requires practice, but it opens up dimensions you never knew existed.


What Are You Actually Listening For?



Sound as Physical Experience

Rhythm exists in your muscles and bones, not just as an intellectual concept. When listening deeply, notice how music affects your body. Does the rhythm make you want to sway? Does an ascending melodic line create a sense of physical lift? Does a dissonant chord or unresolved harmony create physical tension?


There is fascinating research behind these responses. Syncopation (when rhythmic emphasis falls on unexpected beats) activates the brain's motor planning regions, which is why syncopated rhythms make us want to move. Our brains predict where the beat will fall, and when music subverts that expectation, it creates a pleasurable surprise that translates into physical movement. This is one reason why jazz, ragtime, and certain dance movements within classical works feel so irresistible.


Studies using brain imaging have shown that listening to music activates the premotor cortex (the part of your brain involved in planning movement) even when you are sitting perfectly still. Your brain is essentially "dancing" internally, preparing your body to move in response to rhythm. This is not metaphorical; it is measurable neural activity.

Try this. Instead of sitting still, let your body respond. Tap the beat with your foot. Conduct the phrases. Move your hand to trace the melodic contour. This physical engagement strengthens auditory perception and memory.


Pattern and Repetition

Classical music is built from elemental patterns. Listen for ostinatos (repeated patterns), call-and-response structures, layered rhythms. Notice when the composer adds or strips away elements, creating texture through accumulation and subtraction.


Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. When you hear a musical theme for the first time, your brain begins building a predictive model. When that theme returns later (transformed, inverted, or varied), your brain experiences a rush of recognition and reward. Neuroscientists have found that this pattern recognition activates the brain's dopamine system, the same reward pathway involved in anticipating pleasurable experiences.


This is why listening to classical music can feel so satisfying. Composers are essentially creating elaborate games of expectation and fulfilment. The more familiar you become with a piece, the more your brain can predict what comes next, and paradoxically, the more you can appreciate when the composer surprises you. This is why pieces reward repeated listening; each time through, you recognise more patterns and experience new layers of satisfaction.


Music is fundamentally about pattern recognition. Themes transform, structures balance repetition with variation, motifs recur in different guises. Your brain is wired to find patterns. Deep listening simply gives it something meaningful to work with.


Melodic Contour and Shape

Even if you are not singing aloud, try internally "singing" what you hear. Can you follow the melodic line? Does it move by small steps or large leaps? Does it climb or descend? Is it flowing or angular?


Research shows (Bruder & Wöllner, 2021) that when we listen to melody, our larynx (voice box) actually makes tiny, subvocal movements, as if we are singing along silently. This phenomenon suggests that we process melody partly through our own potential to produce it. This is one reason why humming or singing along, even quietly, can deepen your understanding of a melodic line.


Notice the emotional quality of different intervals (the distance between two pitches). Minor seconds (semitones) create tension. Perfect fifths ("Twinkle, Twinkle") feel stable and open. Tritones ("MA-RI-(a)" from West Side Story) are restless and seeking resolution. You don't need to know the names of these intervals; just notice what they make you feel.


These emotional responses are not arbitrary. Certain intervals create acoustic phenomena called "beats" (rapid fluctuations in volume when two frequencies are close together), which can sound tense or unstable. The tritone, for instance, was historically called diabolus in musica ("the devil in music") because of its unsettling quality. Composers have used this knowledge for centuries to create specific emotional effects.


Timbre as Emotional Language

Every instrument has a unique voice, a distinct quality that carries meaning beyond the notes it plays. A melody on solo oboe has an entirely different emotional resonance than the same melody on muted trumpet or on cello. Composers choose instruments the way painters choose colours: for their expressive properties.


Timbre is perhaps the most complex aspect of musical sound. It is determined by the specific blend of overtones (harmonics) that each instrument produces. When you hear a violin play middle C, you are not just hearing that one pitch; you are hearing a complex stack of quieter pitches above it. The unique pattern of these overtones is what makes a violin sound like a violin rather than a flute.


Research in music cognition has shown that timbre affects us emotionally in powerful ways. Bright timbres (with strong high-frequency overtones) tend to feel energetic or even agitated. Dark timbres (with emphasis on lower frequencies) feel warmer, more melancholic, or mysterious. Composers exploit these associations constantly.


As you listen, try to identify not just what instruments are playing, but why the composer might have chosen them for this particular musical moment. Why does Fauré give the mournful melody to cello rather than violin? Why does Britten pair the human voice with horn rather than clarinet? These choices are rarely accidental.


Space, Silence, and Sonic Architecture

Pay attention to negative space: the emptiness that gives form to what is present. In music, silence and space are just as important as sound. Notice how composers use pauses, how they create anticipation through silence, how they give certain moments room to breathe.


Silence in music creates "anticipatory tension". When music suddenly stops, your brain continues its predictive activity, wondering what will come next. This is why a well-placed pause can feel more dramatic than any fortissimo climax. The silence is not empty; it is charged with expectation.


Studies of musical silence have shown that during pauses, listeners' heart rates can actually increase slightly, and their attention sharpens. We are wired to find meaning in silence, to listen even more intently when sound is withheld. Composers like Britten understood this instinctively, using silence as a powerful expressive tool.


Listen also for spatial relationships. Foreground and background. Solo versus tutti (everyone). Antiphonal effects where instruments "answer" each other from different locations in the sonic field. Our brains process spatial information in sound with remarkable precision. Even in a recording, you can often sense depth and placement because of subtle differences in volume, timbre, and timing. In live performance, this spatial dimension becomes even more visceral and powerful.


Embodied Listening Practices



These exercises help you engage with music physically, visually, and imaginatively.


Body Mapping the Music

As you listen, use simple gestures to trace what you hear. High sounds = hands raised, low sounds = hands lowered. Loud = big gestures, soft = small gestures. You are creating a physical "map" of the musical landscape, making the invisible (sound) visible (movement).


Vocal Shadowing

Hum or sing along with different lines as they emerge. First the melody, then try to follow the bass line, then an inner voice. This develops your ability to hear polyphony: multiple independent lines happening simultaneously.


Colour and Image Response

Keep coloured pencils and paper nearby. As you listen, make marks, shapes, or colours that represent what you hear. This translates sonic experience into visual language, engaging different neural pathways. There is no "correct" way to do this, so go with the flow!


Layered Listening

Listen to the same piece multiple times, focusing on one element at a time. First listening: focus only on rhythm and pulse. Second listening: focus on melodic contour. Third listening: focus on harmonic colour. Fourth listening: notice how all these elements work together. This builds awareness gradually.


Walking the Form

If you have space, walk as you listen. Change direction when you hear a new section. Walk faster or slower to match the tempo. Create simple choreography that maps the structure. This makes form tangible and helps you feel the architecture of the piece.


Question-Based Listening

Approach the music with curiosity rather than passive reception. Ask yourself: What is the musical question being posed? What is the answer? Where does the music feel settled? Where does it feel searching? What would happen if this melody went a different direction? Let the music surprise you.


Dancing!

Of course! Really feel what the music inspires in your movements.


Five Works for Deep Listening Practice



I have chosen these pieces not because they are canonical masterpieces (though some are), but because they offer particularly rich opportunities for developing specific listening skills. Each work illuminates different aspects of deep listening and rewards attention in unique ways.


1. Gabriel Fauré - Élégie in C minor, Op. 24 (Cello and Orchestra)

Duration: ~6-7 minutes

Genre: Standalone orchestral miniature

Why this piece: Fauré's Élégie is a masterclass in melodic transformation and emotional nuance. It is intimate, introspective, and rewards close attention to subtle shifts in colour and intensity.

What to listen for:

  • Melodic contour - The opening cello melody has an aching quality. Trace its shape with your hand. Notice how it rises and falls. How does this shape create a sense of longing?

  • Dialogue and texture - Notice when the orchestra supports the cello, when it challenges it, when it takes over the emotional narrative, when the orchestra and cello are in dialogue.

  • Harmonic colour - Fauré uses chromatic harmony that creates subtle emotional shifts: moments of hope that darken, moments of despair that find unexpected light. Pay attention to the emotional quality of different chords without worrying about their technical names.

  • Dynamic nuance - Notice how Fauré achieves dramatic intensity through restraint. How does he build tension without overwhelming volume?

Embodied practice - Let your breathing synchronise with the cello's phrases. Notice where you naturally inhale and exhale.



2. Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31

Duration: ~24 minutes

Genre: Song cycle (six songs framed by a prologue and epilogue)

Why this piece: Britten's Serenade offers extraordinary contrasts in timbre, text-setting, and mood. The unusual combination of voice, horn, and strings creates haunting sonic colours that illuminate the poems of Blake, Tennyson, Jonson, and Keats.

What to listen for:

  • Timbre as storytelling - The horn is a full partner, sometimes shadowing the vocal line, sometimes commenting on it, sometimes contradicting it. How does the horn's "voice" differ from the human voice? What emotions or qualities does it embody?

  • Text painting - Notice how Britten sets words. In "Nocturne" (Tennyson), how does the music evoke the falling dew and dying firelight? In "Elegy" (Blake), how does the music capture the sick rose and dark secret love? Text here!

  • Pattern and variation - The work follows nocturnal themes through different centuries and sensibilities. Notice how each song creates a distinct sonic world whilst maintaining unity across the cycle.

  • Space and silence - Britten uses silence dramatically. Notice the moment after the horn's opening fanfare, the spaces between verses, the way silence intensifies anticipation.

Embodied practice - For "Dirge" (anonymous 15th century), try to feel the steady, processional rhythm as footsteps. For "Hymn" (Jonson), notice the rising melodic lines. Let your posture lift with them.



3. Leoš Janáček - Sinfonietta

Duration: ~24 minutes

Genre: Five-movement symphony for large orchestra with extended brass

Why this piece: Janáček's Sinfonietta is built from short, obsessively repeated motifs that create hypnotic momentum. It is exuberant, folk-inflected, and structurally unconventional. Perfect for practising pattern recognition and ostinato tracking.

What to listen for:

  • Layered ostinatos - The piece builds complex textures through simple, repeated patterns. In the first movement, try to count how many different rhythmic layers you can hear simultaneously.

  • Additive structure - Notice how Janáček adds instruments and layers gradually, building intensity through accumulation rather than conventional development. It is like watching a painting emerge as the artist adds successive layers of colour.

  • Folk-inflected melody - The melodic material has roots in Moravian folk music. It is often modal (rather than major/minor), rhythmically irregular, and built from short fragments rather than long, flowing lines. Can you hum back any of these fragments?

  • Brass fanfares - The opening and closing feature massive brass choirs. Notice the spatial effect. Where do these fanfares seem to be coming from? How do they create a sense of open air, public celebration?

Embodied practice - This music invites movement. In the fourth movement (IV. Allegretto (The Street Leading to the Castle)), try marching in place to the rhythm. Feel how the irregular accents create energy. In the second movement (II. Andante — Allegretto (The Castle, Brno)), sway to the lilting dance rhythms.



4. Kaija Saariaho - L'Amour de loin (Love from Afar)

Duration: ~105 minutes (five acts)

Genre: Opera

Why this piece: Saariaho's opera demonstrates how a contemporary composer can create an entirely new sonic palette whilst still working within operatic tradition. The libretto, based on mediaeval troubadour poetry, tells of a love that exists across distance. The music itself explores spatial depth, spectral harmonies, and the blurring of boundaries between voice and instrument.

What to listen for:

  • Spectral harmony - Saariaho builds harmonies from the natural overtone series, creating shimmering, iridescent sonorities that seem to glow from within. These are not the stable major/minor harmonies of Mozart. They are more like sonic clouds that shift and morph. Notice how these harmonies create atmosphere and psychological states.

  • Vocal colour and extended techniques - The singers do not just sing traditional operatic lines. They whisper, speak, use microtones, glide between pitches. How do these techniques express the characters' emotional states? When Jaufré sings of his distant beloved, how does the vocal quality embody longing?

  • Orchestral texture as landscape - The orchestra creates the sea that separates the lovers. Listen for the undulating string textures, the metallic percussion, the electronic-sounding effects created by acoustic instruments. Can you "see" the ocean in the music?

  • Distance and proximity - The opera is structured around the idea of distance. Notice when voices feel close and intimate versus distant and ethereal. How does Saariaho create this sense of spatial depth purely through sound?

Embodied practice - This opera works on a meditative timescale. Rather than following conventional dramatic action, surrender to the sonic atmosphere. Notice your breathing. Does it slow to match the music's meditative pace?



5. Florence Price - Symphony No. 1 in E minor

Duration: ~33 minutes

Genre: Four-movement symphony

Why this piece: Price's First Symphony deserves to be in the standard repertoire not as a historical footnote but because it is a structurally sophisticated, emotionally compelling work that fuses European symphonic tradition with African American musical elements. It offers rich opportunities for listening to cultural synthesis and formal innovation.

What to listen for:

  • Juba rhythms - In the third movement (Juba Dance), Price incorporates rhythmic patterns from the African American dance tradition. These syncopated rhythms were traditionally performed with body percussion: hand clapping, thigh slapping, foot stomping. Feel the rhythms in your body. How do they differ from European dance forms like the minuet or scherzo that usually occupy this position in a symphony?

  • Pentatonic and modal melodies - Listen for melodies built on five-note scales (like Black spirituals) rather than conventional major scales. In the second movement, the English horn solo has a spiritual-like quality. Notice how this melodic material contrasts with the more chromatic, European-influenced passages.

  • Call and response - African American musical traditions often use call-and-response structure. Notice moments when one instrumental section "calls" and another "responds", or when the orchestra and a solo instrument exchange musical ideas.

  • Formal sophistication - This is a fully developed classical symphony that respects sonata form, cyclic structure, and thematic development whilst infusing these European frameworks with Price's own musical language. In the first movement, can you hear the two contrasting themes? Can you recognise when they return after the development section?

Embodied practice - In the Juba movement, clap or pat the rhythms. For the slow movement, conduct the broad phrases with your arms. Notice how Price creates long, singing lines that float above the accompaniment.


Developing Your Practice Over Time



Deep listening is cumulative. Each time you engage with music attentively, you strengthen neural pathways, build aural memory, develop what musicians call "inner hearing": the ability to imagine and manipulate sound mentally.


Start with short sessions. Ten to fifteen minutes of focused listening is more valuable than an hour of divided attention. Choose one work from the list above (you don't need to listen to the whole thing in the case of longer works - just select an excerpt) and spend a week with it, listening every day with a different focus. Day one: rhythm and pulse. Day two: melody and contour. Day three: harmony and colour. Day four: texture and timbre. Day five: form and structure. Day six: emotional narrative. Day seven: synthesis. How do all these elements work together?


Keep a listening journal. After each session, write a few sentences. What did you notice today that you did not hear before? What confused you? What moved you? What questions arose? Over time, you create a map of your own developing perception.


Mix familiar and unfamiliar works. Returning to pieces you know well reveals new layers. Encountering new music stretches your listening flexibility.


Trust your responses. There is no "correct" way to listen - your emotional, physical, imaginative responses are valid. If a passage makes you think of wind through trees, or your grandmother's kitchen, or the colour indigo, that is your personal meaning-making at work. Deep listening honours both analytical awareness and imaginative, associative response.


The skills you develop here transfer into everyday life. People who practise deep listening report heightened awareness of environmental sound, more nuanced emotional perception, greater patience with complexity, enhanced ability to focus. You are cultivating a quality of attention that enriches how you move through the world.


The music has always contained this potential. Your growing capacity to perceive them is what changes. With each listen, you bring more of yourself to the encounter. The piece you heard last week is not the same piece you will hear next week, because you are not the same listener.

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