The lost art of deep listening:

Choose an album. Lose the phone. Close your eyes. How to keep Coronavirus stress at bay : Listen, really listen, to your favorite albums, front to back, without distraction. What’s your favorite album? When was the last time you listened - actually listened - to it from start to finish? With intention, like you were watching a movie or reading a novel. Clear your schedule for the next three hours. Choose three full albums, whether from your collection or your streaming service of choice. Put them in an ordered queue as though you were programming a triple feature. Because, listen : Musicians spend years making their albums. They struggle over syllables, melodies, bridges and rhythms with the same intensity with which you compare notes on the “Forensic Files” reboot, loot corpses in “Fortnite” or pound Cabernet during pandemics. But most of us are half assed when it comes to listening to albums. We put on artists’ work while we’re strolling through Twitter, disinfecting doorknobs, obsessively washing our hand or romancing lovers permitted with our COVID-free zones. We rip our favorite tracks from their natural long—player habitat, drop them into playlists and forget the other songs, despite their being sequenced to be heard in order. It doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time when listeners treated the mere existence of recorded sound as a miracle. A wonder, a kind of time travel. Priests warned of early wax cylinders being tools of the devil. Vintage images from the space age show couples seated around their high-fidelity systems as if being warmed by a fireplaces. The late experimental composer and teacher Pauline Oliveros coined the phrase “deep listening” for just this practice. Defining it as a kind of “radical attentiveness”, she wrote “I differentiate to hear and to listen. To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” A Stravinsky ballet caused a riot. The least you can do is commit to deeply listening to three full albums. Which is to say, go dig a ditch in your backyard, put your phone in a ziplock bag and bury it. Get comfortable on the couch, which, ideally, is centered in the sweet spot between the speakers. No stereo system? Put on your headphones (pro-tip: Audio Technica has become the recording studio standard) or earbuds, or lock yourself in a closet with your best bluebooth speaker. Whatever works. Stoners will probably tell you to consume an edible an hour prior. Scotch is wonderful (LSD is illegal). None of it is necessary. Mindfulness is essential. Light a candle, or not. Doesn’t matter, but dimmed light will change the environment for the better. Don’t turn the volume up to 11. Set it at 8.5 and then make a pact with the voices in your head to shut the front door. The point is to listen with your ears in the same way you read with your eyes, to absorb the flavor as you would (yet another) velveteen swig of Cabernet washing over your taste buds. Absorb minus the distractions - moment by measureless moment - be transported to a place immune to anything nature can throw at us.

Excerpt taken from The Los Angeles Times, Randall Roberts