Welcome to Sound Arts Intro Course. This first episode is the doorway into everything else.

We start where I like to start most things, with a sound I love, and then we get to the question underneath the whole course: what does it actually mean to listen?

You'll hear the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is what your ears do all day whether you want them to or not. You can't blink an ear. Listening is the work your mind does to make meaning out of all that sound, and it's something you can practice and get better at for the rest of your life.

Along the way:

• Why almost any sound in the world can be enjoyed, once you decide to enjoy it. The fluorescent buzz, the refrigerator hum, the traffic, all of it.
• Three different ways of listening, from the writer and film theorist Michel Chion.
• Pauline Oliveros, and the practice she called Deep Listening.
• Why we've become a mostly visual culture, and what we lose when we forget we're also listening creatures.
• How sound is more intimate than sight, and reaches parts of us that images never quite touch.
• A small taste of silence, and the story of John Cage walking into a room built to be perfectly quiet and hearing two sounds anyway.

Try this after you listen: somewhere this week, take ten honest minutes with one question. What does it mean, to listen? Don't look anything up. Just think, and listen, and write down whatever you find. Keep it somewhere safe. We come back to it at the very end.

Names to explore on your own: Michel Chion, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage.

You are already a listener. You have been your whole life. This is just the invitation to start doing it on purpose. Come listen.