Have I heard this before?

Asking yourself this question when listening to a piece of music, of any style, can help you be able to follow it much better.

It’s something that Aaron Copland talks about in his book What to Listen for in Music?. He doesn’t phrase it the way I did, but the idea is still there.

While you’re listening to one piece of music try to remember the ideas you’ve heard and compare the new music to those old ideas. Are there any themes that repeat? Are there any phrases or melodies that repeat? Are there any chord progressions that repeat?

What this is getting close to is a formal analysis of a piece of music. That means you’re analyzing the form of a piece of music. Form is how different sections of music are arranged. In songs with lyrics this often means you’re looking at choruses, verses, and maybe a bridge or a solo. Same thing often applies to hip-hop music. There is some type of chorus, verse, and maybe a bridge.

Classical music and jazz don’t have the same terminology, but they do have similar ideas.

It’ll take a few listenings, at first, to get used to this, but it gets easier just from paying attention to it while you listen to music. Eventually it’ll become second nature and you’ll be able to figure out the form of a song after one listening.

Listening this way can be interesting because you’ll notice a lot of similarities within genres of music. Often songs within jazz music follow similar types of forms. They often have a ‘head’ or a main melody, then members of the band improvise solos, then the ‘head’ is played again at the end. The same forms don’t happen in all genres, but the same idea applies to songs within the genre of classical music or within the genre of pop music or rock music. There are often formal (having to do with form) similarities between songs within the same genre.

It’ll also make songs easier to follow. Rather than songs being a bunch of different melodies and sections and lyrics they’ll start to become more structured. Some pop songs and classical pieces have very distinct sections. You’ll start to hear those sections as being more distinct when you practice listening this way.

This way of listening also helps with learning songs quickly. If I have to learn five songs for a gig and I have only a few days to learn them, the first thing I do is make a “map” of the song’s form. Often I can do this in one listening. Then I just need to figure out how to play the different sections and compare them to see if they are the same every time they repeat. Making a map of the form as the first step though has made this whole process faster.

I also do this if I’m sight reading a piece of music. It can be super quick and it alone can help me play the song so much better because I have an idea of what is coming up. I’m prepared once those sections arrive.

Next time you’re listening to a piece of music ask yourself, “Have I heard this before?”

ISJ