How to Listen the Right Way

More likely than not, your teacher has drilled into you that listening is just as important as daily practice. "Listen until the songs are stuck in your head! Listen until you are absolutely sick of every Suzuki song!" All true, but why is it so important? And how can we listen in a way that boosts the Suzuki student's learning most effectively?

Why Learn by Ear?

Long story short, Suzuki teachers start with ear learning to free up the student's brain "hard drive" for other things.

Beginning music students have a LOT to think about. There are dozens of details involved in developing good posture and technique, and the brain is simply full to the brim with all that technical content. Many students start learning an instrument while they are still learning how to read language, so reading itself is new to them. If we ask students to focus on both note reading and technique/posture at the same time, both things will suffer. It's simply too much all at once.

Also, students have a tendency to trust their eyes more than their ears -- and this is often counterproductive. When you put a piece of sheet music in front of a student who is a beginning reader but has listened to the Suzuki recording often, a strange thing happens: they start to ignore their listening-based intuition of what the song is supposed to sound like, and instead play what they see on the page. A lot of the time, their reading ability is much less reliable than their ears are, and the student ends up making many more mistakes.

How Listening Supports Ear Learning

If students are going to learn their Suzuki pieces solely by ear, that means they have to know exactly what the music should sound like. Suzuki guitar teacher and pedagogue Joe Pecoraro calls this an "aural image" -- an image in our mental imagination of sound. Without a very clear aural image, students won't be able to tell whether they're playing the right notes or not.

How do we get a clear aural image? By listening...a lot.

Listening Logistics

Here are the basics of what your listening routine should look like.

Listen Every Single Day

You can listen while you do other things (eat breakfast, drive to school, playtime, etc.), but it has to happen every day. Make sure you're getting through the entire recording of your child's current Suzuki book at least once.

You Listen Too!

This is probably the most underrated aspect of Suzuki listening. If you (the practice parent) aren't listening along with your child, then you won't have a clear aural image of the songs they're learning. When it comes time to figure out the notes for a new song, you won't have a clue how to help unless you've been listening just as much as your child.

Make Sure the Audio is Clear

Speakers should be turned up loud enough that every note can be heard. You and your child should be near the speaker, and both of you should be fully awake (no listening in bed at night -- you'll miss the last few songs if you doze off early).

The Power of Singing

A great rule of thumb to evaluate your child's aural image of a song is:

If they can sing it, they can play it.

Singing along with the songs forces us to reproduce the sounds we're hearing, not just passively absorb them. I find that my students learn their songs much more quickly when I encourage them to sing along with the recording at home.

You might be wondering, how can you sing along with the Suzuki songs if there aren't any words?

You're in luck! Check out my downloadable Suzuki Lyrics on the Resources page at thepracticeparent.org.