At some point in the unreconstructed noughties, I read an article about the differences in the way men and women listen to music. I recall it very well. It suggested that men listen to melodies and women listen to lyrics; that men had huge record collections and women had fewer albums, which they loved more; that men liked to argue over “boring things” like time signatures and key changes, while women had a more instinctive connection with the way music made them feel. If I could print that green, puking emoji here, I would.
Within these ideas, unmistakable to me then, was the inference that men understood music better, and cared about it more, than women. I was a young rock journalist at the time, in what was still a male-dominated world, and the suggestion that listening was gendered made my cheeks glow in fury. After all, I knew boys who seemed only to feel through music, each millennial whoop their direct line to sentiments apparently unspeakable. What are tribalism and competitiveness, qualities traditionally associated with male music consumers, if not expressions of deep feeling? The first music fan(atic)s were women: the notion that they fell in love with the Beatles because they wanted to be their girlfriends was missing the point: that music was putting them into a state of transcendence.
Alice Vincent, once music editor on the arts pages of the Telegraph, spent years of her life “setting the measure of a pop star’s performance in 450 words and a few tiny stars… leaving shows halfway through because I was bored or arrogant”. In the world of music journalism she was “silently lobbying for access to the boys’ club. I still don’t know if I ever gained entry”. Vincent was an obsessive music lover who listened to so many records, and went to so many gigs as a teenager, that she damaged her hearing: “There was a time in my life when sound felt like it was everything to me because it moved my body and it smoothed my brain and elevated my being into higher planes.” In Hark, Vincent has set out to think about listening and gender – but also to answer questions that, like her, haunts so many of us in adulthood. Why do we stop listening in the same way as we get older? Why is our relationship with music, as she puts it, withering?
Vincent is viscerally reminded of the intensity of her youthful relationship with sound when, at 35, a sonographer jellies up her belly and plays her baby’s heartbeat through an ultrasound. It is the only noise that has properly moved her in a long time. From that point on, in pregnancy, she seeks out experiences of increasing sonic intensity, standing in a sound-bath in the Mojave Desert, and entering an anechoic chamber, a room soundproofed to absorb all echoes in which people are often left hearing nothing more than their own heartbeat – and often freak out.
After Vincent’s baby is born, she explores other phenomena: phantom crying and the condition misophonia (the acute oversensitivity to sound). The parent’s ear is retuned to a child’s breathing or distress, usually for a short period but, for an unlucky few, long-term after giving birth: the wail of your own child “bores” into you from 30 metres away, pumping your blood faster and thicker through your veins, turning your body into a “kind of emergency”. I recognised Vincent’s descriptions of attending gigs as a newish mother and finding it overwhelming on a sensory level. I also recognised her music-loving parents who, when asked what they were listening to in 1985, said, “Oh, the charts totally passed us by for years because we were busy having you.”
The change in our relationship with music as we grow older is about far more, I think, than distraction and the atomisation of your previous listening habits. When adolescents listen to music they are actively seeking an intensity of experience. In adult life there is plenty of that. Ageing parents, encroaching death, the 4am fears for your child’s future – these are the big feelings you push away, rather than pull towards you, when you’re grown up. After having my daughter five years ago, I couldn’t watch TV: even now, I find films “too much” and sit there reacting as though the people are real, full of outrage when bad things happen (“He wouldn’t do that!”) and exhausted when the credits roll.
The last major musical obsession I had, with the American songwriter Bruce Hornsby, was in 2014. Now, the idea of an intense experience listening to a song in the middle of my average day feels physically daunting, like jumping into a cold lake. These exhilarating moments still happen, but they tend to take place after three pints with the volume turned up too high in the tube carriage, heart racing, then running up the hill towards home when no one is about. It is fascinating to think that feeling this way was the norm, for many of us, for years and years, when we only had ourselves to think about: an adrenalised solitary communion, in many ways incompatible with everyday adult life.
Shortly after the birth of her son, trying to keep her hand in with some music writing, Vincent attends a gig at the Outernet, the modern venue beneath the hellish giant screens on the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street in Central London, not far from where the Astoria once stood. She watches a singer-songwriter doing a 45-minute set. “Between him leaving the stage and returning for the encore, two QR codes appear on the full-bleed screens he’d stood in front of. We are urged to scan them; they take us to a website to buy his album. I give him three stars.”
I recognise the dystopian, sanitised experience of modern gig-going, but a certain detachment from what’s on stage goes hand-in-hand with reviewing gigs for a living. Vincent’s changing relationship with sound also stems from post-natal depression: after her baby becomes seriously ill she develops a new internal monologue “that made sense to me, but was increasingly challenging to keep company with”: a “constant soundtrack” to her day.
When we are able to listen – and when we can’t – is a mysterious process. Generally when something massive happens to you, like a shock bereavement, music is too much. When you’re depressed, it is also very difficult, because depression is essentially a broken connection with oneself. Music is, at best, a direct line to the self, so when it fails to move you, it makes the depression more painful.
Having a child is a loss of selfhood too, in a way, as one becomes two – though it is a loss you would never reverse. In the course of this meditative book, Vincent learns that she is craving a more participatory version of music and sound, even if this just means singing to her child. She starts to think big – in terms of landscape, ice-fall and waves: she calls up a Cambridge scientist investigating whether the aurora borealis can be heard. I am not sure that listening is gendered – something about me will always bridle at that. But it certainly changes as we grow. Once we have others to care for, we listen to connect – and we work to clear the channel to ourselves.
Hark: How Women Listen
Alice Vincent
Canongate, 320pp, £18.04
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See more: The second birth of JMW Turner]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall