Listening habits offer us insight into music’s affect on us as individuals, artists, and as members of the various communities we inhabit. Using the lens of phenomenology to assess and explore the nature of the listening experience, I will investigate recent writings on music perception, and modes of listening focusing on their use: by individuals in everyday life; in perceiving musical works and the role of music in multi-media; and in generating habitus—social codes in the musical cultures we inhabit. Once the notions of habits and habitus have been established, I will posit that listening, in the context of new technologies affords the opportunity to the individual to compose, or use listening as a creative or performative process; generating, as Attali has proposed, “one’s own relationship to the world.”