Listening

For Your Listening Pleasure

April 19, 2024

Francis Barraud: His Master's Voice

After writing last month’s Happy Little Thoughts newsletter (click here to subscribe if you don’t already), I’ve been thinking more about listening. Not just the metaphorical act I wrote about—who/what we listen to, how often we listen to others, if we also listen to ourselves—but the literal “what” that enters our literal ears.

Here are a few simple listening pleasures we can incorporate into our lives to boost physical and mental health.

Music

According to NeuroscienceNews.com, music stimulates the neurotransmitters which affect pleasure by increasing dopamine production, reducing cortisol levels, and even increasing an antibody responsible for strengthening the immune system (immunoglobulin A). Can’t get much better than that!

Even though I love music, I hadn’t been listening to it as much as I’d like—or as deliberately as I’d like. I usually have the radio on when I drive, but that can get frustrating since I have no control over what comes over the airwaves (mostly personal injury attorney ads, apparently) and I’ve been listening to podcasts while I work around the house instead of music since my iPod died in an untimely coffee-drowning accident a few years back. (Yes, yes, I know there are multiple ways to stream music, but I am Old and Set in My Ways and haven’t taken the time to master them.) So I started playing old CDs in the car (yes, my car is also old and still has a CD player Do Not Judge Me), especially ones I can sing along with. Singing has many health and mood benefits, whether or not you can carry a tune, and I love to sing.

The CDs in my collection span many decades of music listening, and hearing certain songs brings back floods of memories. If I hear Devo’s Whip It, I’m instantly transported back to tennis team practice on my high school’s courts. Listening to Broadway musical soundtracks reminds me of fun theater-going with friends, and one Rob Thomas song reminds me of walking laps on a track in Texas with my sister-in-law.

One of my new goals is to explore newer music and artists and add to my collection, in either digital or CD formats.

Nature sounds

Sounds of nature—the breeze blowing in the trees, water rushing through a creek or pouring over a waterfall, ocean waves, rain pattering on the roof, birdsong—are soothing to our nervous systems and can help to improve health and mood. Even using a mobile app which mimics nature sounds can be helpful if the real thing isn’t possible. 

When I go outside to water plants or do yardwork, I try to pay attention to the sounds around me rather than fill my ears with words or music. It’s fun trying to identify different birds by their songs, and all the little rustles and creaks hint at worlds which exist at the edges of my awareness. I forget my frustrations in curiosity, and am reminded of the connection to all the living things around me.

Voices of loved ones

I’ve still got the last voicemail my dad left on my phone, and a recording of my son’s voice when he was a preschooler. They both make me smile when I listen to them.

Next time someone you love talks, really listen! What does their voice sound like? Do they use any particular words or phrases unique to them? You never know when their voices will fall silent. One of the hardest things when my mom was dying was that she stopped talking shortly after I arrived to be with her. What I would have given to listen to her during the last two weeks of her life.

And speaking of silence…

Silence, which is never literally silent, can be incredibly beneficial, too. 

I try to sit with the quiet, but that’s when my mind gets really LOUD and chattery, and all those emotions I’ve been keeping at bay come at me. This can be a bit nerve-wracking, but eventually even monkey mind settles down. I’m guessing we (I) fill our ears with so much noise because of the discomfort we feel when outward silence allows our inner monologue to take over. Still, a bout of soaking up silence does ultimately calm me down.

Whether you choose silence or music, loved ones’ voices or nature sounds, I hope whatever you listen to contributes to a happier, healthier day!

What are some things you love listening to?


Dorianne Laux

What We Don't Say

May 18, 2016

Photo courtesy Randy Storey

Introduction by Ted Kooser: After my mother died, her best friend told me that they were so close that they could sit together in a room for an hour and neither felt she had to say a word. Here's a fine poem by Dorianne Laux, about that kind of silence. Her most recent book is The Book of Men (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012) and she lives in North Carolina.

Enough Music

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,
and we've talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it's what we don't say
that saves us.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1994 by Dorianne Laux, “Enough Music,” (What We Carry, BOA Editions, 1994). Poem reprinted by permission of Dorianne Laux and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Poetry

Silence Amplified

February 10, 2016

Photo courtesy Mirko Delcaldo

Introduction by Ted Kooser: The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight’s deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.

How Is It That the Snow

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2002 by Robert Haight from his most recent book of poetry, “Emergences and Spinner Falls,” New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002. Reprinted by permission of Robert Haight. Introduction copyright © 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.