Lend an Ear to This Advocate of More Attentive Listening

REDLANDS — Alexandra Pierce grew up in a house where talking was an art and listening was not. So she devoted herself to learning how to listen.

Now that Pierce has discovered ways of listening that changed her perceptions and personality, she dedicates much of her life to teaching the art to others.

Once you know how to listen, “You will sense more and feel more about everything you hear,” said the 52-year-old professor of music at the University of Redlands, where she has taught listening courses for both music and non-music majors for 18 years.

“It’s been clear to me since I was very young--probably 8 or 10--that people don’t listen to each other very carefully,” Pierce said. “My mother was a writer and a historian, my father was a speculative economist in a think tank, and later head of the economics department at the University of Pennsylvania, so the house was always full of interesting people. I noticed that it was also full of ideas that weren’t fully heard.”

As she grew up, Pierce puzzled over the mysteries of listening. Slowly, she worked out ways of hearing things that most of us let pass without notice.

It was a long process that she refined while earning a degree in music with Phi Beta Kappa honors at the University of Michigan, a master’s in music at the New England Conservatory of Music, a master’s in music history at Harvard and finally a Ph.D. in music theory and composition at Brandeis.

Pierce’s way of listening is both simple and difficult. Basically, it is just paying absolute attention to what you hear, and then responding to it.

An accomplished pianist and composer, Pierce was 25 and held two master’s degrees in music before “I began to realize through my own playing that I was hearing my music inside my mind rather than really listening to the sounds each time they were played.”

“Because I anticipated the sounds a certain way,” Pierce said, “that’s how they came out. And, since the sounds in my mind were not as many-faceted as what I might have played, my music wasn’t achieving the kind of fullness that it could.”

Pierce spent the next decade teaching herself to listen. She learned to hear what really was around her rather than what she expected to hear. First she applied her new listening skills to music, and then--gradually--she expanded them to include her entire environment, including conversations.

Now she teaches those skills.

“Alexandra has taught me to be selective in what I hear,” said Paul Melzer, 28, a master’s degree candidate in music composition at the University of Redlands.

“She suddenly opened up another world to me. That world has had a calming and enriching effect on my life,” he said. “I have become more aware, and am able to take part more in what’s always around me. Perhaps the words gratitude for life would come into play here.”

Surrounded by Subtle Sounds

First Pierce teaches her students that they are surrounded by subtle sounds they seldom notice: breathing, pencils writing, coughing, doors opening, cars outdoors, birds singing, the hum of a fluorescent light.

“Then I teach them that before they can really listen they must quiet themselves by putting attention on their breathing in and out,” Pierce said. “When one feels quieted, it opens the ability to hear. After a while, the quieting effort becomes almost second nature, and requires little or no conscious thought.”

Next she teaches them to listen to sound in parts. No matter whether it’s people talking, music, dogs barking, or wind rustling leaves, Pierce says you hear it better in parts.

She breaks sound into its “bend,” “height,” “grain” and “volume.”

Bend is the line a sound makes. A singer’s voice bends up and down a lot. On the other hand, industrial noise, like electric motors, tends to be a straight-line monotone without bend.

The word bend itself has a bend to it: it has an innate melody that goes up a little, then down, and stops short. The word allow, on the other hand, goes up in pitch and then trails off. In either case, one can visualize a line that conforms to the word.

Height simply refers to the tops and bottoms of bends.

Grain is the roughness and smoothness of sound. The sound of a moving truck full of scrap metal is likely to have a rough grain. The grain of flute music is smooth.

Volume is loudness and softness.

When you become aware of bend, height, grain and volume in someone else’s speech, the professor said, that awareness tends to transfer to your own way of talking. You start putting more bend into your own conversations, pay more conscious--and eventually unconscious--attention to the height, grain and volume of your own voice.

“One result,” Pierce said, “is that people hear you more clearly, there are fewer double messages. Ordinarily a person does not hear the subtle tones and inflections in his or her voice that convey unexpected messages to listeners. By paying attention to your own bend, height, grain and volume, you gain capacity to convey more precisely the nuances of your intended meanings.”

Also, the professor noted, by listening to the bend, height, grain and volume in other people’s words, you become more attentive to those words and more aware of inflections that have important meanings of their own, so you get much more from what other people say.

Writing a sound history of a location can be interesting and useful, Pierce continued. It involves sitting in one place and jotting down what you hear, then returning at different times of day, repeating the process, and noting how the sounds of the same place can be totally different.

Draw a ‘Sound Map’

In an exercise related to writing sound histories, Pierce finds it valuable for students to draw “sound maps.” Each student takes a large piece of paper and makes a mark on it denoting his or her location. Then, as sounds are heard, the students note on their sound maps exactly where the sounds are in relation to themselves, showing any barriers between themselves and the sound, because barriers change sound. “They get a sense of an enlarged space for themselves, they’re enveloped by a fuller sphere, their immediate world grows,” she said.

Once a student understands a little about how to listen, Pierce has him or her take a vow of silence for a limited time. “It encourages you to listen more,” she said, adding that when she does it she often carries a note saying “I’ve taken a vow of silence until 4 o’clock,” and a paper and pencil so she can respond to questions.

Another exercise requires students to think and talk about sounds they like and don’t like. “That can be helpful because it requires a person to concentrate focused attention on what is heard,” Pierce said. “One way to do that, is to describe the sound: how high is it, what kind of grain does it have, how does it begin, how does it end? I like to take a junk sound, like a scraping chair or coughing, and really hear it.”

Pierce said hearing is sharpened by limiting another sensory mode because when a person closes his or her eyes, or doesn’t touch anything, the person makes up for the loss by listening more attentively.

Listening Workshops

One listening workshop the professor conducts involves taking her class to an isolated campground or forest. She calls it a “hi-fi location” because there are very few sounds to weed out, one from another. Using methods they have learned from Pierce, workshop members listen intently to sounds in the environment. Then they try to imitate them, or make sounds that are “friendly” to what they hear around them. “This teaches them to sense their place in the sound environment, to notice that they contribute to everyone else’s environment, and therefore to realize that they should be more responsible for that contribution,” Pierce said.

“Accepting that responsibility requires listening, and when my students learn to listen they inevitably become more caring, not only about sounds and about the environment, but also about themselves. Their lives are enhanced.”