There are so many pathways to musicianship. In our music classes we sing, play, move, read, write, improvise, arrange, compose, and listen. Of all these skills, there’s one primary way students engage with music outside of the music room, and one skill all the others are predicated on. That is listening.
Most of our students won’t leave our classrooms to become producers of music at a professional level. However, all of our students will consume music through listening. Listening is also how we begin other pathways of musicianship like singing or improvising or playing.
Today we’ll look at how we can use listening as a creative activity.
How is Listening Creative?
Listening as Co-Creation
When we listen to music, we pay attention to specific elements and make split-second decisions about how to make sense of the sounds by cataloguing what we hear. How we choose to label, group, categorize, connect, and order sounds becomes our construction of the piece in our minds. Those choices in our mental construction of a piece are creative. As we listen to music then, we are essentially co-creating the work along with the performers.
Person to Person
Music listening is a personal creative activity, and how we listen is different from one person to another. One listener might hear a piece of music and notice the form. Another might listen and imagine a scene inspired by the music. Someone else might catalogue the timbre of a specific instrument or the way melody is used. These decisions are based on our own backgrounds as musicians, including our aesthetic preferences, imagination, and musical training.
Creative Listening as a Creative Action
Listening is a creative act in and of itself, but it is also the beginning of creative outputs such as improvisation or composition. After creatively constructing music through listening, when we draw on our musical vocabulary to improvise or compose, we’re going to draw on what we have catalogued in our listening. The creative listening is already the beginning of the creative thinking that takes place later in output.
Two Types of Listening: Convergent and Divergent
When we construct music listening activities, we call on a specific way to listen: either convergent or divergent. Both modes of listening are absolutely valuable and necessary in our teaching, but they serve different roles. One focuses on “right and wrong” experiences while the other focuses on creative experiences.
Convergent:
We might decide ahead of time what we want students to listen for. For example, we may ask them to copy our movements to show the form of a piece. We might ask them to pat the steady beat, raise their hand when they hear a new voice enter, or identify the sound of instruments. All of these have a specific correct answer.
These activities encourage closed-answer - convergent - listening. The goal of the experience is for all students to arrive at the same concussion as the teacher.
Divergent:
Creative listening is open-answer, or divergent. In this type of listening, there are many possible correct answers because there are many possible ways of interpreting sounds. The goal of a divergent listening experience is for students to come up with their own answers, instead of arriving only at the teacher’s conclusion.
Creative Listening Prompts
Here are some creative listening prompts you can drag and drop in your classroom right away.
What does this music make you think of?
This one is simple! Students listen to the music and discuss what they think about when they hear it.
Draw what the music might be about.
After students have listened to a portion of the piece, they might draw what they think it could be about. Listening to the music first and inviting students to draw second can help their artistic representations of the piece can be more purposeful. This is especially helpful if the piece is contrasting in emotion or musical elements.
If this music accompanied a story, what would the story be?
Students might draw their ideas as a graphic novel, write the story in narrative form, turn it into a dance, or act it out with a friend.
How should we move to this piece? *Think about it first, then move*
Students can imagine moving in their heads, then show their movement in place (nonlocomotor), then travel with their movement (locomotor) if they want.
What do you notice? OR What do you notice about ____________?
Simply asking students to share what they notice about a music can result in some thoughtful, interesting conversations! Students might simply write down as many characteristics of the music they can think of, or you might provide musical categories (pitch, rhythm, harmony, etc.) for them to consider. John Kratus has done some incredible work around this topic if you’d like to learn more.
What do you notice about this music that no one else might notice?
With this prompt, we’re specifically looking for how divergent students’ divergent answers might be! This is an indication of creative listening that differs from the other prompts because students are intentionally trying to come up with answers no one else might think of. Again, John Kratus’ work has more details.
What do you think the composer / performer / creator wanted you to feel when you listen?
This prompt might tie into some social and emotional competencies as well. With older students, framing the question around what the composer might want us to feel gives some degree of separation between the student and the emotion, which can make the experience less vulnerable. With younger students, you might use a class stuffed animal and ask what the animal feels when it listens. The difference between taking on a personal emotional experience (“this music makes me feel ___”) and using empathy to imagine an emotional experience someone might have (“they might be feeling ___”) changes the nature of the question.
Create Your Own:
After students have had a few listening experiences with a music, they might create their own piece that has the same emotional effect. This is the job film score composers take on. The director often gives composers a “temp track” and the composer is tasked with creating their own original work that gives the listener the same emotional experience. After completing the previous activity where students thought about the emotional impact of the music, they might get in small groups to create their own piece. This could be done just as a vocal soundscape, or it might include pitched or unpitched instruments. Students can check their work by listening to the piece again to make sure their own creation is on the right track.
What if we could join the music with our own improvisation?
Another way to move creative listening towards creating a creative output is to improvise. Students can quietly clap along with the recording. As long as they can still hear the recorded music above their own improvisation, their volume level is appropriate.
Setting Up for Successful Creative Listening
Choosing Music for Creative Listening:
The resources available for creative listening experiences are endless! Smithsonian Folkways and Classics for Kids are good starting points.
Length of Listening:
Perhaps the most significant change we should consider with listening experiences has to do with the length of listening. Depending on the purpose of the activity, it’s not necessary to listen to the whole piece of music in one sitting. In fact, the vast majority of the time, shorter experiences are preferable to longer experiences.
Students might listen to 20 seconds to a minute of a piece, depending on their age. When a listening experience has gone on too long, it will be easy to tell! When students start squirming or whispering to each other, that’s our cue that it’s time to move on.
When to Listen:
Some educators recommend incorporating listening experiences at the beginning of the lesson when student are the most attentive. Others like to use listening activities as a calming way to close the lesson. You can choose what works best for your classroom!
Order of Divergent / Convergent Listening:
Generally, it’s a good idea to start listening experiences with creative listening (divergent) rather than teacher-directed listening (convergent). We’ll start with affirming their experiences and perceptions. After these creative experiences, students can tune their ears to what we want them to notice.
This is a framework for listening that uses student imagination instead of putting the teacher at the center of learning exclusively.
Creative listening is not necessarily superior to convergent listening. It’s good for us to teach students both. After all, as students expand their vocabulary with convergent listening, they’ll have more categories to draw from in their creative listening.
These are some ideas you can use in the classroom right away to encourage creative listening skills in your students, and to develop well-rounded holistic musicians.
References
Diaz, F. M. (2014). Listening and musical engagement. Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 33(2), 27–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/8755123314540665
Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., & Altenmüller, E. (2007). Listening to music as a re-creative process: Physiological, psychological, and psychoacoustical correlates of chills and strong emotions. Music Perception, 24(3), 297-314. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2007.24.3.297
Kratus, J. (2017). Music listening is creative. Music Educators Journal, 103(3), 46-51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432116686843
Peterson, E. M. (2006). Creativity in music listening. Arts Education Policy Review, 107(3), 15-21. https://doi.org/10.3200/aepr.107.3.15-21
Sims, W. L. (1990). Sound approaches to elementary music listening. Music Educators Journal, 77(4), 38–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397880
Smith, J. B. L., Schankler, I., & Chew, E. (2014). Listening as a creative act: Meaningful differences in structural annotations of improvised performances. Music Theory Online, 20(3) https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.20.3.3
