The human ear and brain has a fascinating ability to process auditory signals from the physical environment and make meaning out of it. And it can also create music in the mind, detached from any external input and perception, as a purely neurological origin. In his fascinating book, Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks retells many fascinating case studies of his patients displaying amazing musical abilities or disabling conditions connected to hearing music, all arising from abnormal neurological physiology. For the ordinary person, hearing music in our minds is not a neurological anomality, thankfully, and it is instead a fountainhead for musical thought and expression.

What goes through your mind when you play the piano or some other instrument? Perhaps you’re thinking of the correct notes to hit, where to crescendo or what fingering to use. Perhaps you’re thinking of the mass of instructions your teacher had laden upon you at your last lesson. And, do you also think about how the music sounds, before it is sounded?

Auditory imagery is the act of envisioning the sound of music in one’s mind. Sometimes it happens involuntarily, as in the case of ear worms—we’ve all experienced that catchy jingle which we just can’t get out of our head for days. However, when auditory imagery is purposefully evoked, it can spark a thought-to-action cascade: the musical thought induces the motor system to spontaneously play out the envisioned music on our instrument.

Transforming musical thoughts into sound is just like speaking a language. I find this analogy with spoken language particularly insightful. When speaking, you start with an intention or thought that you want to communicate, formulate it into words in your mind, then summon up your vocal chords to express it with the tone of voice and human emotion that reflects your personality. All of this happens automatically without you having to consciously control your vocal chords or the shape of your lips when enunciating words. Most people can sing without much conscious control, too: you conjure up the music in your mind, translate it to the pitches and rhythm to produce, and then belt it out with passion and abandon. In fact, we may even go further in extending the analogy to playing any instrument. Instead of working the vocal chords, expressing a musical thought now involves physical interaction with the musical instrument. Can we achieve the state of automatically expressing our musical thoughts on the piano without consciously controlling our hands? Can we build a musical vocabulary in which musical ideas flow freely and naturally, and manifest themselves through our fingers moving of their own accord on the keyboard? Can we think about the music we want to communicate, formulate with clarity how it should sound, and then express it with such fluency where the mechanics of movement and sound production come like second nature, just as effortlessly as it is to greet a neighbor with a “how do you do” or as heartfelt as expressing gratitude with a “thank you very much”?

Audiation: Hearing The Semantics of Music

The notion that music making is akin to linguistic expression, germinating from a musical thought and communicated through an instrument or the voice, is the essence of audiation. With auditory imagery, the more clarity with which the pitches, rhythm, phrasing and expression is envisioned the better, as if it were perceived from the external physical world. Audition encompasses auditory imagery, and sits at a higher semantic level. It involves mentally organizing the basic musical elements of tonality and rhythm, and ascribing meaning to its music patterns and structure, just like how we ascribe semantic meaning to words and linguistic phrases.

The Mind’s Ear

Strong audiation and auditory imagery skills allow the musician to play with freedom and inspiration, so I believe it’s worthwhile to practice and hone it.

In my previous post, I had described an Audiation Practice Tool which I recommend to incorporate into your practice routine. I also highly recommend this book, The Mind’s Ear by Bruce Adolphe, with a trove of auditory imagery exercises for developing audiation. The author was impelled to create these exercises after having encountered many (advanced) music students who take the exact opposite approach to their instruments: they have incredibly facile technical skills but are blank when it comes to knowing how they want the music to sound. Technical facility without musical thought, is like having a 50,000-word vocabulary without knowing what one wants to say with it!

The book presents the exercises in a fun yet challenging progression¹. It starts off with elementary exercises which most of us can already do. “Hearing Voices” invites the reader to imagine hearing a friend or family member’s voice reading a passage from a book, poem or play, replete with a richness of tone, inflection and enunciation that is characteristic of that familiar voice. The exercises get progressively more advanced, until by the end, the assiduous reader would be able to hear a full orchestra note for note, with the richness of the whole and the clarity of each individual instrumental part; to anticipate new variants of familiar masterworks or improvise with multiple participants; and to write down or play out what she hears in her mind.

I love that the book adopts a light-hearted sense of humor throughout, and also makes an effort to incorporate examples from theatre and acting. (You can try some of the exercises with your non-music friends, too). To end, I’ll share my top pick for what to me is the most amusing exercise:

In “Mozart has Something to Tell You”, you get to imagine a brand new piece of music by Mozart (one that he never had the chance to write in his short lifetime). For this exercise, you are to sit back, relax, and simply enjoy the music playing in your head. ²

The beauty of this exercise is in knowing that you are the only person in the world to be privileged to hear this wonderful new masterpiece by Mozart!

References

Adolphe, B. (2013) The Mind’s Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination of performers, listeners and Composers. New York. Oxford University Press

Gordon, E. (2001). Preparatory audiation, audiation, and music learning theory. Chicago, USA: GIA Publications

Footnotes

1. There is an interesting parallel between the progression of exercises in The Mind’s Ear and the stages of audiation development identified by Music Learning Theory (MLT) [Gordon (2001)]. I don’t know if Bruce Adolphe had MLT in mind when developing his exercises, but MLT provides a deeper level of understanding to why the exercises are effective.
   
   MLT identifies the stages of audiation development, starting from the very basics of learning to perceive pitch and rhythm and recognize common musical patterns, to being able to retain music in memory and recreate familiar music, to being able to anticipate new patterns in unfamiliar music. MLT also formalizes a series of learning sequents in which music should be taught and learnt in accordance to the stages of audiation development. ↩︎
2. Summarized from the exercise of the same title in [Adolphe (2013)] ↩︎