From Brooklyn to Marin: Learning to Listen After the City

I spent years living in New York City, and for a long time I did not realize I had stopped listening.

Not to music. Not to clients. I mean the kind of listening that happens before intention kicks in — the ambient, involuntary kind. The kind where a city becomes a body, and you start to feel its pulse without meaning to. In New York, that pulse never stops. It layers and compounds: the low groan of the subway under your feet, the percussion of a delivery truck over a pothole, a siren Doppler-shifting away, someone's music bleeding through earbuds on a crowded train. Your nervous system learns to manage it. You build a filter. And after a while, you stop hearing it at all.

That filter is a survival strategy. It is also a loss.

What the composer knew

The composer Pauline Oliveros spent decades developing a practice she called Deep Listening — a way of attending to sound that goes far beyond the casual, selective hearing most of us use day to day. Where ordinary listening is efficient (filtering out what is not immediately useful), Deep Listening is expansive. It asks: what else is here? What have I been tuning out? What does this space sound like when I stop managing it?

Oliveros made a distinction that has stayed with me since I first encountered it in graduate school. She described hearing as physiological — the passive receipt of sound waves — and listening as an active, psychological, and even ethical act. To truly listen, she argued, requires attention and presence. It requires, on some level, willingness.

“Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, feeling, and thought. — Pauline Oliveros”

I thought I understood this when I first read it. It took moving across the country — from the density of New York to the fog-soaked hills of Marin County — to understand it in my body.

The sound of nowhere in particular

The first thing I noticed when I moved to Marin was not the silence. It was the texture of the sound that replaced the city. Wind moving through redwood canopy makes a specific sound — a slow, high, slightly unsteady rush, more breath than rustle. The birds here do not sound like New York birds, which are scrappy, fast, and competing. These birds take their time. A creek runs near where I live, and for weeks after I moved, I kept pausing mid-task because I thought I heard something. I had. I was just not used to hearing it.

The quiet here is not actually quiet. It is full. But it is a fullness that asks something different of your nervous system. Instead of filtering and bracing, you are invited to open. And I found, unexpectedly, that opening felt strange. Even a little threatening at first. My body had learned to brace. Stillness felt unfamiliar in a way I had not anticipated.

This, it turns out, is a thing that happens. The nervous system acclimates to its environment. In a chronic state of input — noise, pace, demand — the system organizes around vigilance. When the input suddenly decreases, that vigilance does not immediately dissolve. It looks for something to attach to. It takes time, and sometimes it takes intention, to let the body register that it is actually safe to soften.

Sound as nervous system

This is where the clinical and the personal converge for me. In my work at Oreka Sound, I often meet people whose relationship to sound has been shaped by environments they did not choose. The child who grew up in a chaotic or loud household. The person who has spent years in an open-plan office. The adult who has lived through chronic stress and whose body has become expert at bracing but has forgotten how to release.

Sound is not neutral. It reaches the nervous system through multiple pathways — the auditory nerve, yes, but also the vagus nerve, the bones of the skull, the proprioceptive system in the body. Certain sounds and rhythms can signal threat. Others, under the right conditions, can begin to signal safety. The body is always listening, even when the mind is elsewhere.

This is why, in a session, the way I play — the tempo, the dynamic range, the use of space between notes, the timbre I choose — matters in ways that go beyond aesthetics. Sound is in a constant dialogue with the nervous system of the person in the room. A slow harmonic progression at low volume can begin to lower physiological arousal. Sustained vocal toning creates internal resonance that the body registers directly. Space and silence are not absences; they are part of the clinical structure.

What the city gave me

I want to be careful not to frame this as New York bad, Marin good. That would be too easy, and also untrue. The city gave me something irreplaceable. The sensory density of New York trained my ear in ways I still draw on every day. When you have spent years listening in crowded rooms — subway cars, community music therapy sessions in hospital wards, group work in school gymnasiums — you develop a particular sensitivity to signal within noise. You learn to hear what someone is expressing underneath the surface of how they are expressing it. You get good at noticing the thing that does not quite fit. The unexpected pause. The pitch that wavers. The breath held too long.

New York taught me to listen with urgency. Marin is teaching me to listen with patience. Both are necessary. The best listening I do — in the studio, in sessions, in relationships — draws on both.

A practice, not a destination

Deep listening is not a state you achieve and then maintain. It is something you return to, over and over, the way a musician returns to a scale or a meditator returns to the breath. The conditions of modern life — screens, notifications, the pace of information — work against it constantly. There is nothing wrong with you if your attention fractures. There is something worth examining if it never settles.

One of the simplest things I have found is this: pause, and let your hearing expand outward rather than directing it at something specific. Not concentrating — diffusing. Let the sounds of the room come to you. The ambient hum of the building, the sound of your own breath, whatever is outside the window. Give it ten seconds. Just to see what is there.

Most people are surprised by how much they have been missing. Not because the sounds were hidden. Because the filter was too tight.

“The ear is always open. It is the attention that learns to close — and, with practice, to open again.”

In the fog

There is a particular kind of morning in Marin where the fog comes in low and sits in the trees and everything feels muffled and close. The light is diffuse. Sound travels differently — softer, with less echo. On those mornings, I walk before I open my laptop, and I try to do nothing with what I hear. No interpretation, no categorization. Just reception.

It sounds like a small thing. It might be one of the most important things I do all week.

I moved here from New York eighteen months ago, and I am still learning how to listen in this new key. I suspect I will be learning for a long time. That feels right to me. In music, in therapy, in life — the ones who are still learning are usually the ones worth listening to.