Approaches to Listening Podcast Episode 9: Combining Listening and Performance

This episode's audio is taken from William Taylor's YouTube livestream concert on May 31, 2025. If you'd prefer to watch the video version, click here.

Tonight, we'll be exploring principles from my research and podcast, Approaches to Listening, in tandem with live performance. So for those who aren't familiar with the thesis statement of my podcast and my research in general, it's this: How you listen determines what you hear. What you hear determines what you feel and think.

So listening is an interesting skill that is rarely considered and rarely taught, but it's fundamental to connection in music. And I found that that connection also occurs with both people and ideas. Connection to those things is strengthened through these principles of listening. So here are a few introductory examples of how listening can affect connection.

First, to ideas. I heard this analogy just last night. Imagine you're reading a great book, but you're reading it to fulfill an assignment at school. You're reading it to make sure you get a good grade and show understanding of the most important points. And so you read the book, you fill out a book report, and you never really connected with the material, never really connected with the book. You were just looking for specific things to fill out the report. Good listening or good engagement, connection, with the book can offer a richer experience.

Or here's an example of how listening can affect connection with other people. I think of Belle in Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Gaston. Gaston sometimes interrupts, but most of the time, he listens to Belle. He hears her out. But then he says whatever he wants. He's not really connecting with her even though they're in dialogue with each other. Listening could remedy that.

And finally, coming to music. We've all had opportunities to hear remarkable music, but I'm confident that all of us have been surrounded by incredible music, but it hasn't really affected us. It's just kind of there. In all these situations, that's where listening comes in and the principles I teach come in. This is the skill that allows you to play an active role in both the connecting and the receiving process.

And of course, tonight, we'll be exploring those through music. My research has come to this conclusion: that there are four fundamental types of listening. Two are fueled by thinking and two are fueled by feeling. And tonight, we'll explore each of those in turn. And to begin, we'll start with a thinking filter. Now I use the word filter in listening because each of these approaches, each of these filters lets in certain information and stimuli and rejects others.

So we'll start with a thinking filter, the analytical filter. So this is how this filter works. You engage with a work of music in pieces. This filter could be thought of as zooming in to find the details of how every little piece works, what it does, and how it connects. Another way to think of analysis is it's the naming process. If you're looking at music, you could say, "Oh, this is this chord. This is this note. This is its function. This is what it's supposed to do." And you could do that with sentences. You could do that with computer or virtually anything, a recipe. You zoom in, find each part, and identify what it does in the whole.

Now, you don't need music theory or music history to analyze. You could say things like this, “I love it when the guitar enters.” That's analysis. You notice there's no guitar. Suddenly, there's a guitar. Noticing when the beat drops, or noticing if things get really soft or really loud really quickly. All of that is analysis.

So let's engage with some music through analysis just to see what it offers. And before I play some music, I'm going to introduce the piece to share some of my analysis with you. So this piece is called “Coin Song,” and it's from Final Fantasy VI, and was then arranged for the Final Fantasy VI Piano Collections. This song is played as two brothers interact. These are two princes interacting right after the king dies. They realize one of them will have to take the throne, and neither of them wants the throne. They both have their dreams, and the throne would prohibit them from reaching their dreams. So they come up with an idea. The older brother comes up with this idea that they'll flip a coin, and whoever wins gets to pursue their dreams while the other takes the throne.

The plot twist is that the older brother knows that each coin has the same result and he stacks it in his brother's favor. So this scene takes place on a clear night, on a tower of their castle. So there's some facts, some of the pieces of the puzzle that shape this song. And now I'll play a bit for you, just a teeny bit, to start us off, and invite you to apply the analytical filter to see what pieces of this work you can identify and separate from the whole.

[piano music]

So there's just a segment of the piece, but already there's enough music to do some analysis. And here are some of the potential findings that I think you could identify from this analysis. You can notice that the right hand plays the same thing over and over, while the left hand changes its harmony. You could say it's a slower, calmer piece, or maybe identify that there might be what we call text painting that the piano sounds maybe like the night sky and stars in the sky. All of those are elements of analysis.

And when you put on the analytical filter, you're kind of hopping from detail to detail. The right hand's doing this. Now the left hand's doing this. Maybe this is what that thing means. But you're engaging with detail after detail, piece after piece. So here's the whole song, just to put it in context.

[piano music]

Analysis offers amazing insights to listeners. You could figure out questions like this: Why does the piece end the way it starts? How do sections relate and connect? Or what's the defining feature of this section? But there are limitations to analysis, the biggest being that you have to engage with it piece by piece. And when you do that, there's a temptation to have a fragmented experience where you're jumping from piece to piece instead of engaging with the whole. So those are the offerings, some of the offerings, of the analytical filter.

Let's turn to another filter to see what it offers. Let's go to the other thinking filter, the critical filter. Now, this filter is pretty easy to understand, and it can be really frustrating when you're engaging with people who are using the critical filter when you're not.

The critical filter, when it's turned on, you begin thinking in terms of right or wrong, good and bad, or I want more, I want less. At this point, you've identified through analysis what you want in music, and you're seeing if the music you're engaging with holds up. It's like you have a rubric and a clipboard, and you're evaluating the work.

So let's try applying the critical filter to a piece and just know that I'm intentionally playing it in a way that might highlight some mistakes.

[piano music]

So that was part of Chopin's “Raindrop” prelude. And if you were applying the critical filter, you could say, "Okay, you obviously played some wrong notes." And if you wanted to get more picky, you could say that I phrased a section wrong, and that could be compared to putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable in a sentence. If you wanted to say some good things, you could say, "Oh, well, it's a nice piano. Good choice of music that you're performing.” And all of those are fruits of the critical filter. But here again, with the critical filter, you're engaging in pieces. The second you say, "Oh, you made a mistake," you have to think about that, and you kind of lose the thread of the moment.

So while this is similar to the analytical filter, the critical filter has a much more definitive approach. You're not just listening for what's there, you're also evaluating and judging it based on either past experiences or your education. This filter is very restrictive. It's a narrow funnel that only allows highly vetted material to pass through and affect you. And so this begs a couple of questions, these questions, do we need the critical filter? Or could we separate ourselves from using the critical filter entirely?

My belief is that this filter is vital. There's so much good music in the world, and there's plenty of less good music. And this filter helps you pick between the two. And at the end of the day, I don't know anyone who truly thinks beyond good and bad or right and wrong. And so I think with that being the case, it's important to use your judgment intentionally. And that's why it's useful to know about the critical filter so you can choose how you use it and when you use it.

So far, we've talked about the analytical and critical filters which have you engage with a piece in segments, or sections or pieces. But there is an alternative, and that's one presented by the feeling filters, experience and exploration.

Now, as a side note, both the pieces I've played tonight, I've only played sections of them. That's because that's all you need to use the thinking filters. As soon as you have a section, you can analyze it or critique it. But let's move on to feeling filters as they have you engage more with the whole of a work. And we'll start with the experiential filter.

Now, when you use the experiential filter, your listening is focused on feeling. It's focused on the sensations in your body and mind and the visceral reactions you'll have to the music. Most of the time, this filter is found spontaneously. You don't have to actively seek it out. But especially for overthinkers, which I count myself as one of those overthinkers, you have to know how to access this filter.

And my favorite way is just to go off the sage wisdom of Qui-Gon Jinn where he says, "Feel, don't think." Thinking is a sign that you're in another filter. You're using the analytical or critical filters if you're thinking. So remember that this filter is all about feeling, and thinking will take you out of that feeling. So let's move to another work of music and just explore what the experiential filter offers.

[piano music]

So with the experiential filter, the question is not, what do you think? It's, what did you feel? Now, when discussing things like music, there's a huge temptation to say, "I think." It seems like that's a more definitive, authoritative answer that shows better, you know what you're talking about.

But the experiential filter is all about feeling. And when artists and audiences connect with the feelings that music brings, that is when I believe art is reaching its highest potential. So what did you feel? It could be peace, sadness, a feeling of up and down, a sigh of relief, or a combination of lots of other things.

But here's an important thing to remember about feeling. Feeling holds 50% of listening's potential, and thinking holds the other 50%. And both unlock the other as they grow and progress. If you only think your music, you'll be restricted in your listening. And the same is true if you only feel your music. Feeling and thinking have to work together. And when they do, your potential in listening is really unrestricted. So feeling asks you to engage with the big picture, with the whole. And oddly, it does that by requiring you to be in the moment.

If you think about a sensation, say if you hold something out in front of you, you can feel the pressure it puts on your arms. And then if you have something to think about, like who was the second president of the United States, for a second, you disconnect from the feeling, and the feeling is diminished or maybe even forgotten. The same thing happens in our listening. If we start thinking, we feel less. And so the trick to mastering the experiential filter is the trick to feeling, not thinking, like Qui-Gon Jinn said.

And then, of course, that's complicated by the dilemma that feeling and thinking need to work together. So it's a tricky balance to find, but I think the experiential filter offers the height of musical experience. It does in my career. But let's take a look at the final filter, which is also a feeling filter. And this one is exploration.

Now, if you think about the narrow funnel of critique where you're saying, "Yes, this is good. Therefore, I want it. No, that's bad. I don't want it." The exploratory filter is the opposite. When you listen to music using this filter, you are widening your perception. You're gathering as much sensation as possible because this is a feeling filter. You're observing or hearing what's there without critique.

You could also think about it as zooming out of the music to get the big picture. So while you're exploring, you don't engage with details. If you say, "Oh, that's really nice. I want to listen to that inner line. I really want to listen to the bass." That's zooming in. That takes you into analysis. And you're also not evaluating. That's critique.

And while you are feeling like the experiential filter, there's this added component to this filter that you accept that you don't know what you're listening for. So exploration is what you should use when you want to give your full attention to a sound, but don't know what will come of it or what you're listening for. It's a hard filter to maintain that state of exploration, but it brings a freshness to listening.

Every time if it's used properly, it brings an organic connection to the music. Because instead of going off of your preconceptions or your biases, you're trying to listen beyond what you know. Exploration requires that you begin with a blank slate. So even if you know the piece, exploration can offer a fresh experience. So let's try out the exploratory filter with some of the work of some of the piano works of Debussy.

[piano music]

An interesting note about exploration and that exploratory state, it's nigh impossible to maintain. And that's okay. My experience with exploration is this, that when I start a listening with exploration, I notice more interesting things than I can count. And eventually, I have to connect with one of them that is just irresistible. And as soon as I do engage with that element and leave that sort of elevated listening position, I'm engaging with another feeling, with another filter, either experiential, analytical, or critical.

However, I think that exploration is almost always the best filter to lead out with, especially if you don't know the music you're listening to. So to wrap up, I'd like to return to Chopin's “Raindrop” prelude as I didn't play that one in its entirety. And now that we've introduced all four filters, I'd like to give you a listening chance with a blank slate instead of me herding you towards one.

[piano music]

So there are the four filters.

I hope you had a chance to use each one and to taste what it offers and also what it doesn't. Because once you understand that, you can use each filter intentionally and really cater your listening experience to your wants and your needs. And I hope that you keep on using the filters, whether that's listening to music or in conversation with others or in reading, they offer insight into how we take in information. And once we have that insight, once again, we can just choose more clearly how that whole process is shaped.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed the material and want more, you can check out my website, approachestolistening.com. Please consider signing up for my newsletter, which has a really nifty recap of all my creative works. Or if you'd like, you can directly support my research through a donation.

I'd like to close with a quote by Thoreau that highlights to me the potential of listening and art in general, but specifically listening.

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful. But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

And that is what listening offers you and anyone else who learns this skill. How you listen determines what you hear and what you hear determines what you feel and think. So thank you for tuning in, and thank you for listening.

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