Happy to say that TEDx Nashville has posted the video of my talk there from March 31. The theme of the day's events was "Making A Difference," so I pulled together some ideas I'd been sketching for some time into a talk I called "Hearing The Difference: Accidental Lessons in Listening." I was motivated by my belief that for young people growing up outside of musically inclined families, our culture, media and schools offer up very few if any opportunities for discovery of our aural universe and engaged ways of listening to music, the world and each other. In coming days I'll post some of the other lessons in listening that I couldn't squeeze into this talk. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this and if you do, please share it with friends.
I'd also love to hear from you about your own epiphanies in listening. It would be great to compile them one day into a book.
Thank you for the TED talk Mr. Havighurst. I've definitely experienced epiphanies in listening before, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe them as such. That's a great term for it.
A couple of years ago, I was reading something where an artist was describing the recording process of one of their songs. They said they told the drummer to only use the snare and "not touch one tom." I didn't know what a tom was so I looked it up and found a YouTube video describing the various elements of a drum kit. Watching that video totally changed the way I hear drums. What used to be several different sounds that I thought of generally as "drums," is now a snare, tom, or hi-hat, etc. It's such a simple thing, but it has made the music much more interesting.
Posted by: Kelly | May 04, 2012 at 06:51 PM