Re: AUDITORY Digest - 8 Mar 2007 to 9 Mar 2007 (#2007-57)

[Daniel Levitin <levitin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date:    Fri, 9 Mar 2007 16:40:13 -0500
> From:    Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Listening to, and thinking about music
>
> A mind question, a question of mind.
>
>
> Today a colleague framed the following situation:
> "Is it possible to listen to music without thinking about music?"
> or,
> "Is it impossible to listen to music without thinking about music?"
>
>
> Are they two separate activities that coexist like the white and the
> yolk of a scrambled egg?
>
> Best
> Kevin

I think it depends on what you mean by "thinking."  If you mean 
"conscious awareness" or "awareness of one's own awareness" It is 
certainly possible to listen to music without stopping to have the 
metacognition that "here I am listening to music."  This happens most 
clearly when people enter trance states or get into the "flow" of the 
listening experience (in the Csikszentmihalyi sense).  It's also 
possible to just be listening to music and have your mind wander.

I guess it also depends on what you mean by "listening" and I'm not 
trying to be funny or cute here, but some authors have made a 
terminological distinction between "listening" and "hearing," the 
former implying a kind of conscious, analytic mode.

Dan Levitin