Music – An Unusual Listening Experience

By: Dame Evelyn Glennie DBE

Date:: 11 May 2011

For those of you who know I am profoundly deaf, it might come as a shock for me to write about listening to music.

However, it cannot be assumed that I, or others who are deaf, have no relation to music and hearing. For me, music is a form of communication bringing together the essential ingredients of rhythm, pitch, tone, timbre, dynamics, structure and most of all feeling and sensation.

Understanding music and what is “good” or “appropriate” to listen to and what is not, is very much down to individual preference. However there are often perceptions which are used by film and television directors and producers when selecting music to add to their visual material.

Production Music
Production Music libraries such as Audio Network utilise these perceptions to create guidelines, general ideas and thoughts to help produce a variety of tracks and music clips to add to their catalogue.

As a composer, I too need to tap into those perceptions much as I did when I first began to create sounds as a child. My listening experience is unusual because I have no option but to “live” the sound at the moment, not being reliant on past recorded material or memory of sound as an infant.

We can all treat our body as a huge ear - that is something that actually happens to all of us whether we realise it or not - but have you actually slowed the body down and truly felt music as a physical sensation and how does that affect what you see?

Composing and Manipulating Sound
When I work with co-composers we might discuss these perceptions, i.e. jingly bells for Christmas on Seasons Greetings or eerie sounds for Halloween – we see them in a very visual way before we pick up an instrument. We consider the merits of a typical instrument such as a marimba on Ouija for example, and then we might try adding something completely unusual such as bowing the keys or putting a whistle into water or an instrument on top of a timpani.

Manipulation of sound is hugely rewarding and really stimulates the senses and before you know where you are so many other sounds are created that can never be found through electronic means but then we have try to remember what the original remit was!

As an avid reader I enjoy nothing more than to ‘listen to’ music that is fast paced and exciting at the same time. The vibrations from a fast pace piece of music can stimulate my thought processes making the reading material more exciting such as Snowball by Warren Buffett. This book is great because it is so inspirational. Likewise, I enjoy the feeling of fast pace music when watching a dramatic scene in a film or a play – I can feel my pulse racing as the excitement mounts.

Experiencing Music
As a musician I want to be sure the listener has a good experience. However, I recognise we all ‘hear’ differently. In an auditorium for example, the audience in the front row will experience the music in a different way to those at the back or in the balcony. The orchestra will collectively experience the sound completely differently to the soloist and each member of the orchestra will hear the sound different again depending on where they are sitting.

I am also aware that emotions can change our listening experience too. You may have experienced a day or a time when you have been particularly stressed or rushing to meet a deadline and suddenly the music choices you make are irritating even though they might be music clips you ordinarily enjoy and vice versa.

When composing and performing music I need to be fully aware of the variants but of course as beauty is inevitably in the eye of the beholder thus listening is mainly thought to be trapped in the domain of the ear of the listener – luckily I know different!"

Do listen to my production music tracks and hopefully you'll see what I mean!
www.evelyn.co.uk