These listening challenges provide you a week of new experiences, which provide daily activities to acquire new sound skills. You will learn to listen with your whole body with advice and activities shaped by sound experts, artists, musicians, and other leaders in the field.
Each challenge is simple (most take around 15 minutes or less) and designed to bring you a specific benefit. You’ll activate unconscious perceptions, focus your attention, exercise your empathy muscles, and discover new connections.
Listen to music producer Moby guide you through the challenge. Listen to Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort for at least ten full minutes. Don’t read or look at your phone just focus on the sounds. Listen beyond your normal attention span.
If you’ve ever heard minimalist music or a Buddhist ritual, you might be familiar with the power of the drone—a continuous note, sound, or cluster of tones. A drone can be a monotone or a subtly changing pattern, but it’s sustained much longer than most other sounds we listen to.
Listen to author, yoga teacher, and musician MC Yogi guide you through today’s challenge.
Amazingly, 93% of personal communication is nonverbal. Voice, tone, and body language play a huge role in how we understand each other. Yet we often place the most emphasis on words and what they mean (or what we think they mean), without paying much attention to all the ways we communicate through sounds and gestures.
Listen to sound therapist and meditation teacher Sara Auster guide you through the challenge.
Sound is vibration, and sound waves travel through your body. We typically think of our ears as our primary organ for hearing, but it’s actually a group effort involving the ears, the eyes, and the skin. You’ve probably experienced these physical effects of sound, like when you get close to a loudspeaker and can feel the low notes vibrating in your body.
Deprioritize your ears and listen with other parts of your body today to transcend the way you typically experience sound.
Listen to Robert Hammond, co-founder of the High Line guide you through this challenge.
Sound is all around us. The doors closing on the subway, the screech of a car’s brakes, and the hammering of construction all contribute to the acoustic ecology of New York City. Step into Central Park and new sounds emerge—wind in the trees, birds chirping, or the hum of a mosquito.
Artist Hildegard Westerkamp considers the specific sonic environments we inhabit, as well as the ways that acoustic design (or lack thereof) can impact our ability to listen.
Listen to Sophie Everhard, Director of Sofar Sounds NYC, guide you through this challenge.
How does your voice reflect your position in the world and the way you perceive it? How do social rules shape our inner voices and our ability to express them in public? How can you use the sound of your voice to create change and to challenge convention? It’s not always easy to put your own sound into the world.
Listen to artist Amanda Giacomini guide you through this challenge.
Beyond the words we say to each other, sound impacts our social structures, etiquette, and conventions. We can represent sound as an image, or even as an idea.
Today, you will try to visualize and describe the sounds you hear as a way to understand the subtle ways sound impacts your life.
Listen to Jane Hsu guide you through this challenge.
How can you become more aware of your sonic environment? Throughout this week, you’ve been completing daily challenges to help do just that, and you may have discovered new ways to listen.
The composer Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was also interested in this question. She created the practice of Deep Listening as a method to expand consciousness and listen to the whole space/time continuum of sound. It is a methodology designed to help people listen without judgment or goals, break patterns, and expand the realm of possibility.