The Elements of Listening: Notes 3 — Space
By Rafi Mercer
I. The Room as an Instrument
Every note we hear is shaped by space. A trumpet sounds different in a cathedral than in a cellar. A whisper carries differently across marble than across velvet. Music is never just what is played — it is also where it is played. Space is the invisible instrument, the collaborator that shapes every performance.
Step into a listening bar and you will feel it instantly. The records are the same as those you own, the turntables perhaps even familiar, but the experience is transformed. Why? Because the room has been tuned. The placement of speakers, the weight of curtains, the dimensions of wood panels — all of it conspires to create a geometry where sound is more than heard. It is felt.
Space is not backdrop. Space is substance. To understand listening, we must learn to hear the room as much as the record.
II. The Silence Between
Space is not only physical. It is also temporal — the pauses, the rests, the gaps that make music breathe. A melody without space collapses into chaos. Rhythm without pause becomes mechanical. It is the gaps, the negative space, that give music shape.
In Japanese aesthetics, this is ma: the interval, the emptiness that holds meaning. In a listening bar, ma is everywhere. The silence before a record begins. The gap between sides A and B. The breath of air when no one speaks, because the music requires attention. These spaces are not absence but presence. They are the architecture of listening.
To live the listening bar life is to value these intervals — to treat space as music.
III. Walls that Listen
When I began tracing the logic of listening bars, I realised that the walls are never passive. They are tuned. Wood absorbs warmth, glass reflects sharpness, fabric softens edges. Each surface acts as a collaborator.
Think of JBS in Shibuya. Its shelves are crammed with records, but those same shelves are acoustic panels. They scatter sound, breaking up echoes, creating intimacy. Or Eagle in Yotsuya, where heavy curtains turn the room into a cocoon. Or Studio Mule, where concrete gives bass a certain gravity. The walls themselves are part of the system.
Listening is not just about speakers. It is about what the sound meets on its journey to your ear.
IV. Space as Distance
Space is also about distance. The placement of speakers, the position of your chair, the triangle you form with the system. In a listening bar, this is deliberate. The sweet spot is calculated. You sit not anywhere but somewhere. And from that position, the soundstage unfolds — instruments placed across an invisible landscape, each one occupying its own location.
To learn to listen is to learn to map this soundstage. To hear not just melody but placement: the piano to the left, the saxophone to the right, the bass anchored at centre. Music is not flat but spatial. It has width, depth, height. Once you notice it, you begin to hear in three dimensions.
V. The City as Soundscape
But space is not confined to rooms. The city itself is a soundstage. Think of the rhythm of footsteps on a rainy pavement, the Doppler curve of a car passing, the way a station announcement reverberates against tile. These are accidental compositions, shaped entirely by space.
The listening bar life teaches us to tune into them. To notice how an alleyway narrows sound into intimacy, how a square expands it into openness, how a park softens it into hush. The city becomes a symphony of spaces.
VI. The Producer’s Space
Great producers think in space. Brian Eno’s ambient records are landscapes of distance and echo. King Tubby turned dub into a laboratory of spatial manipulation, using echo and delay to create endless depth. Teo Macero spliced Miles Davis into collages where silence and reverb opened new rooms within the recording itself.
To listen deeply is to hear these choices. To notice how producers use reverb to expand a voice, compression to bring it close, delay to stretch time. Space is not background but technique. The record is a building; the producer is its architect.
VII. Space at Home
So how do we live with space in our own listening? Begin with the room. Experiment with speaker placement, with surfaces, with furniture. Notice how the sound changes with a curtain drawn, a rug added, a chair moved. Treat the room as an instrument, tune it by ear.
Then, practice space as silence. Resist the urge to fill every moment with sound. Let quiet sit before you press play. Let an album finish before the next begins. Honour the space between.
Finally, practice space as distance. Sit in one place, attentively. Map the soundstage. Notice how instruments occupy the room. Listening becomes not flat but architectural.
VIII. Why Space Matters
At its core, space matters because it reminds us that music is not disembodied. It lives in the world. It interacts with matter, with walls, with silence. To treat music as mere data is to miss this. To embrace space is to remember that sound is physical, relational, shaped by environment.
The listening bar is a masterclass in this truth. It demonstrates how a room can be an instrument, how silence can be music, how placement can be meaning. It restores music to its architecture.
IX. Coda
The Elements of Listening series began with Silence, then Waiting. Now comes Space. Together they form a triad: silence as frame, waiting as rhythm, space as architecture. Each one deepens the act of listening, moving us away from consumption towards experience.
Tonight, when you sit with a record, notice the space. The space in the room, the space in the music, the space inside yourself as you listen. Notice how sound inhabits it, reshapes it, reveals it.
This is the third element of listening. Not abundance. Not immediacy. But space — the invisible instrument that makes music real.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.
