In Your Mind is Being Fracked from The Ezra Klein Show, D. Graham Burnett describes a procedure for actively listening to music. I think this procedure is also generally useful for anything that you can engage with several times (e.g. a piece of artwork, a poem, or a short video, a location).

  1. Listen (or more generally observe)
  2. Listen/recall, what have you heard before? (what have you observed before?)
  3. Listen/discover, what do you hear for the first time? (what can you observe for the first time?)
  4. Don’t listen, what do you find when you don’t listen? (what do you notice when you’re not actively observing?)