Listening Fatigue

When working on music for several hours without break it is a relatively common problem for many composers to start to suffer from ear fatigue. You start to hear things that are not there or start to not hear things that are obvious problems. Especially in work phases that are essential for the sound (like mixing, mastering) these things can become problematic.

Some of the mixing engineers that I have worked with in my life have developed the habit to make a 20 min break every hour. While at first this seemed excessive, I quite quickly noticed that it makes a lot of sense to work like this. Especially in the last phase of working on a track when you really polish the details, it can be extremely helpful to step away from it for a while and then listen to it again with fresh ears. Even better would be a night sleep in between which however is not always possible.

In my opinion there are two factors that are relevant here why this procedure does help. The first would be to regain more of an overview of the piece again. When working on small orchestration or production details, it can become quite easy to get lost in small details and   blow these out of proportions. Everybody knows the feeling of getting bored of their own music because they listened to this so many times so you start to add additional material to make it interesting again for you while for a potential first time listener this would be completely overwhelming. The same applies when you dig yourself into detail work where you most likely go over a small section of the piece over and over again and make changes that go beyond what would be necessary or even good for the piece. Letting go of this and step away for a moment and then approach the piece again with an overview very often reveals the "too much" that you have put in while being on the details. 

In fact this is one of the most common issues with inexperienced composers when you can clearly see that they have become bored by their own music and started to counteract it but completely went overboard. Probably the most classic example would be when you start to add secondary melodies and lines to the first statement of your theme because you feel like it needs that while in reality, your audience would need the pure version of the theme to actually process it. It took me a while to understand this but it is a strikingly simple concept once you realize it. Just try to listen to ANY of the iconic themes by the great masters. You will notice that the first statement of a theme in almost any case is a strikingly simply and straght forward rendition of the theme.

The other factor are tired ears. A classical example for that would be to start ducking all the "resonances" that you hear in the music by applying small band EQs everywhere in the spectrum just to notice later on that hardly any of the frequency range is untouched. The more you dig into these things, the more likely it is to hear things that are not there or not hear things that do need attention. The more routine you have in such cases the easier it is to become aware when you go overboard or need a break but probably everbody has experienced moments when you listen to music the next day and wonder what the hell you were doing to it the day before.

Both of these issues can have a considerably negative effect on the music that you write or produce and especially when you lack experience and routine in these things it can quickly derail into something really problematic. The more you do that, the more you develop an intuition of what is necessary and the more you remain objective but some fatigue can not be avoided. At some point, your ears and your mind will just be too tired to keep a neutral view on things.

This is a very personal thing, but most mixing and mastering engineers that I know have a relatively strict routine of frequent rests. And in spite of feeling like you lose time with these many rests, in the end you will most likely be more efficient this way as you don't get lost that much in dead ends. And unfortunately, sometimes deadlines don't allow for much but it should be a habit in "normal work" situations to frequently step away from work and put your mind and ears on something else before returning back to it with a fresh look/listen.