Listening intently to your favorite music is one of the most fruitful activities in cultivating your musical abilities. Listen with all attention.
Listen to music with your awareness keen on sounds and tonal qualities. Listen to the Tanpura.
Listen to music with your awareness keen on sounds and tonal qualities. There is a lot to listen within a single note. We have the inherent ability to perceive the structure of sound, (the ability to separate out different components of sound). This is quite obvious in terms of ability to make out sounds from different instruments even when they are playing in unison.
What we are not aware of at a conscious level is that even a single sound, like a single key stroke on a piano, has sound components. It is these components that give characteristic timbers to instruments. We have the ability to hear the timber components separately too, but this ability is subconscious. With cultivation, once can bring this to the level of consciousness. While listening to tonal quality or timber of sounds, try to feel the structure of that sound. This structure, if at all perceived, is abstract and can't be verbalized.
While listening to Indian Classical Music, listen to the sound of the tanpura as if the tanpura is the main instrument and the rest of the sounds (voice as well as instruments) form accompaniment.
Listen keenly to a selected piece of music with the intension of memorizing it in its entirety. Listen repeatedly till you become so familiar with the music that you can replay it in your mind. This is much more than simply memorizing songs and tunes. The idea is to be able to mentally 'replay' the music (as you would hear replayed on the music system) without any deliberate effort. To the extent possible, the 'replay' should be faithful in terms of tonal quality. To test the quality of your 'mental replay', try it while you play the music on your music system).
Once you can do this, you can pick up another piece and do the same. It is important that you choose music from your favorites.
You can also go through the same exercise for small passages lasting a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes. The aim is to learn to replay the music after the very first listening. Of course, quality of the replay will suffer, but that is ok. Here the tune and timing are more important than tonal quality.
Imitation is a great tool for self learning.