On Feb. 7, Edina High School seniors Jack O’Brien, Ray Anderson, and Michael Howard placed second at the 2025 Music Listening Contest Championship following their first-place win at regionals.
The EHS Music Listening Team competes annually at competitions, where they identify songs and answer questions about music.
Howard and Anderson joined the team their sophomore year, while O’Brien joined his junior year. “It was just something that our band director had mentioned in class that was available for us, and so me and a few friends decided to try it out,” Anderson said. “At first, we weren’t very good, and then we just kept at it. This year was kind of a big breakthrough for us.”
The Music Listening Team practices once a week, going over excerpts and doing practice tests.
Anderson described the nerves that he and his teammates felt going into the competition. “We were kind of nervous because we knew that this was our last year,” Anderson said.
Every year, the organizers of the competition send out a collection of over 30 selected songs and a compiled Spotify playlist of the music. The team’s task is to study the songs and composer to eventually be able to identify them from short snippets at the competition. “We try to get the fingerprint of the composer and the song in our ear,” O’Brien said.
The competition is composed of five rounds. In the first round, the team is asked to name the piece and composer after hearing a 10 to 30-second snippet of the piece. Next, they must answer questions about the piece based on an excerpt. The third round is called the “lighting round,” where teams only receive a shorter two to five-second snippet to identify the music. In the fourth round, competitors must answer trivia and multiple-choice questions. Finally, during the fifth and final round, the teams are quizzed on songs they have never heard by composers they are familiar with. “It’s a combination between the actual listening knowledge and then just like music background,” Howard said.
The team has learned a lot about both music and teamwork through the competition.
“It definitely introduces you to modern composers who you’ve probably never heard of and also really old composers that are more obscure and don’t get listened to a lot,” Howard said.
Looking back on his experience at regionals and the championship, Anderson said he appreciates the team dynamic brought out by the competition. “[We learned to] work as a team to know each other’s strengths [and] know what we need to work on so that we can eventually be successful,” he said.

This piece was originally published in Zephyrus’ print edition on March 27, 2025