In my personal experience there’s a distinct difference between “hearing” and “listening”. Hearing is something done involuntarily. It’s the noise that’s all around us in our everyday lives such as cars passing by, sirens, rain hitting the window, etc. Listening is something done actively, this means you’re giving your attention and focusing on a sound and trying to understand it’s meaning. I certainly believe we make choices about what we actually listen to, I can turn on the TV and focus on a different task. Even though I “hear” the TV, that doesn’t mean I’m actively listening to it. The criteria used is by prioritizing what’s important to us, is it something worth listening to. Structural features such as race, gender, or social class do matter to how we listen, for example if the president is giving a speech on tv, you’re more likely to see a lot of people actively listening to that rather than something going on around them.  Schafer and Krukowski discuss there is a relationship between sound and space. In NYC specifically because of technological advancements and growth, the city gradually became loud. Nowadays people listen to music on their headphones to block out the sounds of the city because it wasn’t something they wanted to hear.