Hrishikesh Hirway is a connoisseur of listening in every way: he is an avid listener of music, he created the podcast Song Exploder (where he listens to songs with the artists of those songs), and he is a producer and songwriter himself. Listening is embedded into his lifestyle, and yet, as he shares in his TED Talk, he is still learning about how he can better listen to others.
During his talk, Hirway explains how he learned that although he might be great at listening to music, he realized that he could improve at listening to people. During his podcast, he would focus the conversation on just one song, but he learned through holding these conversations with artists that there was a lot more to the artist and their art than just the song.
He describes how so many doors were opened when he began listening to others more intently and curiously, and he hopes that others will take up a higher interest in listening and learning about the stories of other people rather than sharing their own.
Due to technology, there has been a shift in the way people communicate, and therefore the way through which people listen to each other has changed. Hirway fears that due to this paradigm shift in communication, we may be traveling the wrong direction in terms of listening to each other.
Hirway recommends that we shift the paradigm shift and redirect it so that people become more interested in listening to the stories of others. He gives an example of a song he wrote in order to show people how the stories of others can make life so much more meaningful. He plays a segment the song without background information, and then tells the story behind his song and why he wrote it how he did. In listening to his story, the audience understands much more about his music so that when he plays the full song, the emotional impact of the song is extremely elevated.
Another strategy he uses in his speech to further his message is an analogy. He relates listening to accessing different parts of a house, correlating different levels of interest with different levels of exploring a house. This helps the audience to understand the concept of listening more deeply so that they can apply it in their lives.
Overall, I feel that Hrishikesh Hirway is a skilled speaker, and I feel that his message about listening is certainly an insightful topic and something that I hope to apply to my life moving forward!
Nice post, listening to TED talks are always super interesting. Good job explaining Hirway’s message, and how he encourages a paradigm shift, it was well written!
This is such an interesting topic! I too think that technology has extremely altered our means of communication and not completely for the better. We need to actually listen to one another in order to more effectively communicate.