The Art of Writing About Listening These days I am writing a book about listening to music. Not in the neurochemical way! (Remember the late-"90s to late-oughts vogue for books about how your brain reacts to baroque counterpoint, and all that? Oliver Sacks, Robert Jourdain, Daniel Levitin? Are you more engaged with music after reading those books, or do you just ask your hypothalamus what it thinks about the new jams?) I mean listening through, like, the ears. So I have spent a lot of time with the books in my house that come to grips with listening as process and reaction and ritual, the real-time experience of it, how music might change our listening and how our listening might change music. I am always looking for books like this. There aren't that many. Here are a few. In 1998, Christopher Small, the New Zealand-born musicologist who taught in England for most of his academic career and eventually retired to Spain, published his final book, "Musicking." He was fascinated by how playing music and listening to it were equal partners in the construction of a culture. "The act of musicking," he wrote, "establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies." The concert experience was a life-affirming, matrix-building, two-way ritual for Mr. Small, and on both sides of the stage-lip: not only for the musicians, but for those in the audience banging their heads or subtly nodding along in row J. (Even roadies, he insisted. Even the tech crew.) The book includes some deep criticism of classical-music culture; he called the typical symphony concert "bedtime stories told to adults," though he unapologetically loved his Haydn and his Mozart. But "Musicking" always has bigger fish to fry. Judith Becker's "Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing" (2004) is for anyone who has ever tuned into a single chord or repeated rhythm, started "playing it" internally, found his perception and body language changing, and then wondered, 15 minutes later - after a gap in linear consciousness - whether he might have temporarily become the music itself. Ms. Becker, a specialist in Southeast Asian music at the University of Michigan, summarizes acres of study in and around the topic, by linguists, philosophers, historians, psychologists, musicologists. A small section is, in fact, scientific: temporal lobes, brain stems and such. But Ms. Becker's book, focusing mostly on traditions from Bali, Indonesia and India, is really about the building of a learned-response culture around trancing out to music - a reaction that has long been seen, depending on where you live in the world, either as an aberration or the whole point of hearing someone play a tune. It comes with a strong CD, too, including Sacred Harp singers from Fyffe, Ala., roaring out their giant power chords, and a cathartic passage from the Balinese dance-drama "Barong and Rangda." A recent book which I think will last a long time, Daniel Cavicchi's "Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum" (2011), describes the institutionalization of concert listening in 19th-century America, before record players. It's about what it meant for an average person to feel curious about a touring performer - he writes at length, and with great insight, about the opera singer Jenny Lind, who for two crucial years had P. T. Barnum as a Svengali - to respond to some buzz, enter a theater, listen among others, and start forming opinions about art and entertainment. He writes about "cultures of hearing" in churches and theaters, using diaries and newspaper accounts and criticism; like Mr. Small, he's arguing that the untrained but interested listener is as necessary as the musician in shaping a musical culture. Mr. Cavicchi is one of the three editors, along with Susan D. Crafts and the excellent Charles Keil, of "My Music," a 1993 book of interviews with average listeners about how they use and value music in their daily lives. It is a short, soulful, often mundane and overall gorgeous book. The interviewees, arranged in order of age, are between 4 and 83 years old, from diverse backgrounds, and presented without last names. There's a mechanic, a jazz guitarist, a dance teacher, many students and retirees; they say shortsighted or credulous or profound or trivial things, about Tina Turner and the Grateful Dead and gospel singing and Grover Washington Jr. A college student named Rhonda, for example, talks about the love she shares with her brother for Pink Floyd records. We are able to feel, lock into each other's minds, and fuse together to produce energy on a level so high, it cannot be touched. When Pink Floyd's perfection gets involved with the scene, a triangular bond of such cogent power shoots through us that if we aimed it at something it would probably explode. Hey, Professor Becker! Over here! Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The Times.