With the explosion of audio technology, at any one moment you can listen to your favorite band on an iPod, video chat on Skype, tune out typical office buzz, watch a singing cat on YouTube, and talk with a friend on Bluetooth. With dozens of sound sources striking your ears at any one moment, how can you train your ears to listen and not just hear (and ignore) sounds? How can you filter out the unimportant noise in your life and focus on truly listening to what matters?

“We know more about hearing than listening.” – Pauline Oliveros

Legendary composer Pauline Oliveros developed the concept of Deep Listening as a unique way to develop the ear in relation to actively listening to sound and not just hearing. Deep Listening fosters creativity in the arts and technology by cultivating improvisation and an “appreciation of sounds on a heightened level.”[1]

In other words, by training your ears and mind to actively listen to sounds, instead of tuning them out, you will enjoy an increased level of audio understanding, deeper levels of creativity, and connectivity with your environment.

In between concerts Pauline Oliveros took the time to share her insight about Deep Listening with Easy Ear Training:

“Deep Listening explores the difference between hearing and listening. Though we receive sound waves through the ears these waves are transduced to electrical impulses by the mechanisms of the ear and transmitted to the brain where listening takes place. The ear does not listen – the brain listens.

Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound. Listening can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Listening still is a mysterious process that is not the same for everyone although we have consensual agreements on the interpretation of sound waves delivered to the brain by the ears. We know more about hearing than listening.”

- Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening institute

Click to read the rest…

Recent talk of the possibility of a new Queens of the Stone Age album before the end of 2011 has me certifiably giddy. I’m a big fan of lead-Queen Josh Homme’s side project Them Crooked Vultures, and their 2009 self-titled LP spent some serious time on my turntable. So, I suppose that has helped to tide me over.

But the Queens were so prolific for so long – they never went more than about two years between albums since they released their debut – that I’ve been hardwired to expect new music from them on a consistent basis. Now it’s been four years since they dropped their last LP, Era Vulgaris, and I’m going through withdrawals.

So maybe that’s why I’ve been obsessively rediscovering Era Vulgaris so much as of late. When the album came out in 2007, I listened to it quite a bit, but for one reason or another I never fully gave myself over to it. I liked it a lot; I just didn’t leave it in my car stereo for a year straight.

Fast-forward to 2011, and it’s one of the three albums I need to have within arm’s reach while I’m driving, lest I feel uneasy. I need to know I can reach for it, find it, and have it tunneling itself into my ear holes within seconds of the need arising. (I have it on my iPod, but I keep a CD copy on hand just in case. It’s a sad state of affairs.)

In large part, this is due to my seemingly unending love for the first track on the album, the densely layered – and awesomely unconventional – “Turnin’ On the Screw”. I don’t want to say that it’s radically unlike any other Queens of the Stone Age song, because the band has a history of exploring way more sonic ground than they’ve ever received credit for, and it’s not like this tune suddenly finds them unrecognizably genre-switching. It’s clearly Queens of the Stone Age.

Queens of the Stone Age – Turnin’ on the Screw

But there’s something gut-wrenchingly exciting about it, and it seems to stem from the band consciously exiting their comfort zone.

The reason I want to talk about it here is that, while it’s on the most base level a bludgeoning rock song, it’s also a track that demands to be listened to on headphones so you can really appreciate how well the band uses stereo mixing to add incredible texture to its many different sections.

Click to read the rest…

Those of you who are regular readers of The Oatmeal will have noticed a recent feature: The Teenager Audio Test, otherwise known as “the Mosquito,” a mysterious sound that only youngsters can hear.

We at Easy Ear Training love anything that gets people thinking about exploring their ears, but this page left a lot to be desired. The Oatmeal explained nothing about what the Mosquito tone really is, why only some people can hear it, the damage it might do you, and why—when you click on the link—you may not even be hearing the real Mosquito sound.

The Oatmeal is not alone in producing poor-quality features on the Mosquito; even some prestigious broadcasters have been guilty of the same thing. In this article, I’m going to bust five myths about the Mosquito, and expose some of the basic mistakes the press make when talking about it.

Myth 1 – The Mosquito is complex and high-tech

There’s nothing very complicated about the Mosquito sound. In fact it’s the most basic sound there is: a sine wave, which looks like this:


The Mosquito: A 15kHz Sine Wave (viewed in Audacity)

If we analyze the sample provided by The Oatmeal, then we can see that the wave goes up and down fifteen thousand times a second, meaning it has a frequency of 15,000 Hertz (15kHz in shorthand). To put that into perspective, the highest note on a full-size piano is around 4kHz, and frequency doubles for each octave you go up, so you can see that the Mosquito is about two octaves above the highest note that a piano can produce!

[If you want to know more about audio frequencies and the limits of human hearing, try our Frequency Fundamentals series.]

On to our next myth…
Click to read the rest…