Hearing Is Knowing

Friday, December 26, 2025

I had planned to wind down this listening series—focused on long-appreciated vocal artists—by stepping back and making observations about sound and musical genres. But something unexpected has happened along the way. By focusing closely on artistic styles, writing about musicians’ unique deliveries, and staying deeply attentive to how musical communication actually works, I’ve found that I can’t quit listening.

I’m no longer paying much attention to genres, backgrounds, or music as accompaniment to productivity or outcomes. Instead, I’m listening, paying attention itself—and seeking presence. I want to stay with sounds longer—to hear them doing their work.

Many of my earlier thoughts about “hearing music” resurfaced recently when I was visiting a neighbor’s garage. On most Friday nights, a group of long-time friends gathers there simply to play music together. No audience. No metrics. No urgencies beyond the shared pleasure of making sound and keeping time.

My “hearing memories” revived and renewed something essential. I have known—personally experienced careful listening and how it compels. Such listening feels vital. Yet, today, we mostly listen differently. Because we’re immersed in musical worlds that too often demand performance, circulation, and justification.

I’m not into re-circling nostalgia. I’m not into longing for vanished eras or arguing that music was once “better.” I’m into something more elemental that’s happening. By listening carefully, again, to humans singing, vocally or instrumentally—I am hearing them—as fully inside their voices.

This listening slows one down. Asks for patience. Asks not to scan ahead for what might be coming. Instead, it asks for staying with what’s here, now. Close listening alters the sense of time: it makes songs stretch, silences matter, and imperfections more meaningful than distracting. A sincere listener is less interested in quantity—or heavy listening—and far more in depth.

Something within me softens while listening to a singular voice, human or instrumental. There are sounds that don’t carry a brand or a narrative. They carry a “life”—shaped by contradiction, limitation, courage, and persistence.

Listening closely and hearing an artist’s lived history is a form of genuine respect.

I don’t expect others to hear exactly as I do, or to be drawn to the same voices. I’m simply inviting participation and noticing. Consider what sounds make you stop and lean in? Consider what sounds refuse to fade, even after a song ends, and a voice winds down?

Close listening helps us know where originality truly lives—and, equally important, in the encounters between the sounds and listening. It’s renewing my feelings of curiosity and wonder, pairing them with the acceptance that not everything needs sorting, explaining, or resolving.

Some things ask only to be heard.

I plan to keep listening—slowly, attentively, and without rushing to name what I find.

If you’ve been listening along with me, we’ve shared those quiet spaces between notes. We feel quietly grateful—and very much in the know.

— Diana