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Move your listening position
A whole range of filters takes all sound down to what a person pays attention to. Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters, yet they create reality in a way, because they set what is being paid attention to right now.
Listening positions are a way of using them. Moving the listening position to whatever suits the thing being listened to means playing with the filters as levers: getting conscious of them and shifting to different places.
There are many positions, or scales of positions, to choose from. Of the practical listening exercises, this one is probably the most important, and it is very exciting to play with.
How does the brain filter sound?
Donald Broadbent proposed in 1958 that attention works like a filter, letting one channel through for full processing while others are held back. His model grew out of experiments in which people heard different digits in each ear. Anne Treisman found that unattended speech is turned down rather than blocked, so meaningful content can still break through. In her 1960 experiments, listeners repeating a message from one ear sometimes followed its meaning into the other ear when the two messages swapped sides.
What does attention do to brain signals?
In a 2012 study in Nature, Nima Mesgarani and Edward Chang recorded from electrodes on the surface of the auditory cortex in patients who heard two voices at once. From the neural activity alone, the researchers could tell which speaker each listener was attending to. The cortex tracked the attended voice closely, while the other voice was largely suppressed.
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