If you’re like me, you like listening to music all the time. And if you’re like me, you are also now in a graduate program in language and literacy education, which means you do not have time to do anything except read incomprehensible books about sociocultural theories of language.

Perhaps you are not exactly like me. But I’ll bet you sometimes find that although you were once the type of person who needed nothing more than a dark bedroom, a pair of headphones, and a copy of Portishead’s Dummy to spend a blissfully contemplative evening soaking in your favorite pastime (listening to records), you are now the kind of person who doesn’t do that.

There could be any number of personal reasons: you have kids now, maybe, or two jobs. But I suspect things have changed for most of us simply because too much music being thrust toward us. Being a music enthusiast today feels somewhat like being an unwilling participant in a paintball battle: here they are, hundreds of brand new things, each exquisitely crafted to get your attention, coming straight at you, from the internet, the TV, other peoples’ phones, weekly newspapers, friends.

In light of all this, I offer some suggestions, some experiments in purposeful music-listening, for each of us who loves music but feels its purpose floating away from us. I hope you will consider them, maybe try one out, and report on the results. I’ll try the same after I finish this book by Bourdieu.

Audio Divina. No blasphemy intended—I just figured if you can do it with reading (lectio), why not try listening? Obviously, this is a spiritual approach to music-listening, and it might be difficult to do with, say, a Kelly Clarkson single (I am not responsible for any epiphanies that may, in fact, emerge from repeated, meditative listens to “Since U Been Gone”), but you might want to try it with a song whose mood suits the idea of diligent, spiritual contemplation – something like “Spirit Fall” by David Åhlén (recommended by a Good Letters reader), or “Melody of You” by Sixpence None the Richer.

Slow Listening. This idea was proposed by music critic Michaelagelo Matos, who wrote last year, “I’m only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time; the next MP3 can only be downloaded once I listen to the first one. With CDs, if I buy one, I have to listen to it all before I buy another, and before I am allowed to rip any of it to iTunes.” This is a wonderful idea for people caught up in the cycle of newness that pop music perpetuates (I admit I used to be the kind of person who buys five, or even fifteen, albums at a time), or for, say, Andy Whitman, who I’m sure is bombarded by free albums daily from every angle imaginable.

The Stephen Fry Experiment. Fry, the British actor, writer, and general polymath, proposed a simple experiment in a newspaper column included in the his collection Paperweight: “If you like popular music go out and buy five classical records and listen to them five times a day for a week…. If you like classical music go out and buy five popular records and listen to them five times a day for a week and let’s have no more nonsense.”

I actually attempted to carry this out last year (the first part, obviously) and admit to being unsuccessful. I rode my bicycle to my favorite neighborhood record shop—a hole-in-the-wall in Hangzhou where the only discernible difference between the legitmate CDs and the pirated ones was the price (the former ten times the price of the latter)—and was able to, in a blind, flailing sort of way, select five classical albums, including some guitar works of Hector Villa-Lobos, and something by Yo-Yo Ma.

I got as far as two days before I started listening to pop songs on my computer again. This method is recommended for people with discipline.

Local listening. By now, the move to more carefully consider the sources of our food has become mainstream—in fact, the “slow listening” method was itself influence by the “slow food” movement—and the application to music seems entirely possible. “Locavores” eat food made in their own geographical areas, sometimes making a commitment to only eat things grown within, say, a hundred-mile radius of their homes. Try listening only to artists who live in your hometown for, say, a month. Go to local shows you’d never have considered, instead of seeing U2 at a stadium. Maybe listen only to music made by people you know for a week. I suspect this will have implications beyond music-hearing habits.

Physical music only. Computers allow us to do many things, like listen to KEXP or read Good Letters, but they also emit evil waves of electronic sloth. Often, after ten minutes on the internet, I have forgotten what I sat down to do and am in the middle of downloading an obscure David Axelrod record, a Sound Opinions podcast, and an mp3 of a friend’s band while I go into a trancelike daze and am unable to accomplish anything for the remainder of the afternoon—not even listening to the music I downloaded.

So maybe I’ll try this: only listening to music that is encoded on a physical object, like a CD, or LP, or cassette (!), or even only listening to music that is physically given to me by another person, without the involvement of the internet in any significant way. (The more ambitious could go the other direction, and try “live music only.”) This could prove difficult, but sometimes I feel it may be the only way out.