Whether you’ve ever heard of it or not, Audiation is a core skill which permeates the entirety of your musicality.
It’s a skill which many overlook, and most don’t think to actively develop. Yet the more you improve this skill, the easier and more effective all your music learning and music-making will become.
Simply put, Audiation is the ability to hear music in your head. It’s sometimes called “inner hearing” or “hearing in your mind’s ear” (analogous to “seeing in your mind’s eye”).
It’s the aural equivalent of visualisation, and just like visualisation there is a whole spectrum of ability levels, from being able to conjure up only very basic imagined sounds, through to a full, rich “playback” in your mind.
With visualisation, we can imagine either a static, fixed image—or a video-like scene which evolves over time. Music is always expressed with a time component (even a single note you hear or play has a beginning, middle, and end), and so there is a time component to Audiation too. As we’ll be exploring below, one aspect of your audiation skills is the length of a musical phrase or excerpt which you can comfortably conjure up. This is closely related to your “musical memory”.
Another useful way to describe Audiation is “thinking in sound” or “thinking in music”. Just like with spoken language, there is an imagined equivalent (hearing words and sentences in your head as you think), we can develop the ability to “think” in music by hearing it in our mind on demand.
It’s worth noting that the word “audiation” was originally coined by the music education pioneer Edwin Gordon, as part of his “Music Learning Theory” approach, and that within that system it has a precise technical meaning. However, it has also come to be used in the more informal way described above, meaning simply “to imagine hearing music in your head”. At Musical U we use this more informal definition because it provides a useful catchall for this broad and versatile skill.
Below we’ll look at the benefits of Audiation and how it connects to various other musical skills and activities, with a particular highlight on singing. Then we’ll explore some ways you can assess and then actively develop your audiation abilities.
Audiation is a powerful skill to develop, but it’s important to know: this isn’t a new skill to learn from scratch. In fact, you already audiate frequently! Any time you get a song stuck in your head, or you remember a song in your mind, or if I ask you to imagine how “Happy Birthday” goes, as soon as you “hear” music in your head, you are audiating. So although we’ll be covering lots of ways to improve your ability to audiate, don’t feel intimidated or overwhelmed at all. It’s an ability you already have, we’re just looking to refine and extend it.
Developing your Audiation has a positive effect on a wide range of musicality skills, and it can significantly increase your overall enjoyment and appreciation of music. Although we’ll be making plenty of concrete suggestions for incorporating audiating into your musicality training (for example, as part of our “Listen-Engage-Express” framework for Playing By Ear), it’s valuable to keep in mind that Audiation is so fundamental a part of your musicality, that it can and should be part of almost every musical activity you do!
That’s why we’re featuring this chapter so early in the book. The more you become aware of the role of Audiation and the more you develop your audiation abilities, the more you’ll see it is relevant and involved throughout everything you do in music. So although we’ll cover some specifics below, please keep in mind that there are no fixed and firm boundaries to Audiation!
Overview
In this chapter we’ll begin by looking at the benefits of intentionally improving your audiation abilities and the connections to other areas of musicality. We’ll then introduce three levels of Audiation which can be helpful to assess and improve your audiating, and exercises you can do to practice with each level.
Benefits and Connections
It’s quite shocking how little Audiation is discussed in mainstream music education, given how widely impactful it can be on so many areas of a person’s musicality. Let’s look at some of the specific ways that improving and extending your Audiation will benefit you in your musical life.
Musical Memory
An easy way to start thinking about and developing your Audiation skills is with musical memory. Think of a piece of music you’re learning to play, or just your favourite song. Stop reading for a moment and see if you can conjure up that music in your mind. Can you hear how it goes? How much of it can you remember? How vividly do you hear it? For example, is it just the rough shape of the melody, or a full, detailed musical arrangement?
When you’re just starting out, don’t be discouraged if you find your musical memory is surprisingly lacking! It can be a shock to realise that a piece of music you thought you knew well is actually quite difficult to “play back” in your mind, without looking at the notation or having heard a recording of it recently.
On the other hand, you may find that there are certain songs or pieces that you have a clear mental imprint of, and you can “press play” in your mind and hear it almost as vividly as if you were listening on headphones.
Musicians often worry about having a “bad musical memory”. We’ll be covering memorisation in detail in Chapter 6: Superlearning, but for now it’s helpful to note that memorising how to play music is distinct from remembering the sound of the music.
Improving your Audiation and improving your musical memory go hand-in-hand, and even if your focus is on remembering how to play the music, you’ll find that having a clear, detailed, reliable “mental representation” of the sound of that music is actually a huge component of being able to remember how to play it. More on this in the section on “Mental Play” below.
Musical Imagination
Your ability to conjure up great-sounding music in the world depends entirely on your ability to conjure up great-sounding music in your head That goes double for improvising, if you’re following an improvisation approach which focuses on bringing the music out from inside you, like the Expansive Creativity framework you’ll learn about in Chapter 15: Improvisation. There are other improv methods which rely on memorised “vocabulary” and strict “patterns” and can operate with zero Audiation. However, for that very reason, these approaches tend to produce limited, robotic, generic and same-y sounding improvisation. More on that in the Improvisation chapter. .
Audiation can be used purely to “play back” existing music you’ve heard or played. However, it can also be usefully combined with creativity frameworks, providing you with a kind of “musical playground” in your mind, where you can experiment with new musical ideas.
Again, the language analogy is helpful here. Sometimes we do speak without thinking first, but can you imagine being able to speak a language without the ability to form sentences or think of words in your mind? Even if we’re not preparing sentences and hearing them in our head before speaking them, it’s clear that the ability to conjure up original sentences on-the-fly is directly dependent on our brain’s ability to imagine language and think in words.
Similarly, if you want to be able to express original musical ideas out loud, you’ll want to develop the ability to create original musical ideas in your mind first.
Relative Pitch
This connection between being able to remember music and being able to audiate it easily and vividly also has implications for skills like playing by ear and improvising. To put it simply, it’s hard to play a song by ear if you can’t actually remember how it goes!
When we talk about “improving your ability to audiate”, one major focus is the accuracy of your sense of pitch in your mind. This is a topic we’ll cover in depth later in the book, but for now just be aware that your ability to judge the pitch distances between notes in music (called “Relative Pitch”) is crucial, and it all starts in your mind. The more accurately you can “hear” the notes and their relationships in your mind, the easier it will be to process and recognise them when you hear them in the real world. Audiation is a really powerful tool in Relative Pitch Ear Training, because when your ear is trying to figure out the distances between notes, a lot of what you end up doing is mental gymnastics and imagining e.g. “Oh, is it this interval or that interval?”
Another example of the connection between Audiation and Relative Pitch is how a lot of musicians think they “can’t sing” because when they try, the pitches don’t come out correctly. Often it turns out that their ability to match pitch and their vocal control (see next chapter for details) are actually fine—but they don’t have a clear mental representation of the pitches they intend to sing i.e. they can’t audiate the melody. This is a bit like trying to hit a bullseye without having a clue where the dartboard is! You can have the best aim in the world, but if you don’t actually know where the target is, of course you’re going to struggle.
Which leads us to…
Audiation and Singing
Even if you don’t consider yourself “a singer”, there is nothing that compares with how directly singing is tied to your sense of music and your ability to express yourself musically. That’s why we’ll be devoting a whole chapter to the topic.
When it comes to Audiation, Singing has particular significance.
Singing and Audiation are really two sides of the same coin—Audiation can be considered as “singing in your head” and singing can be considered as “audiating out loud”.
Just like Audiation, Singing can become a kind of “universal mastertool” which you can apply in a wide variety of musical activities to help you better learn, improve and perform.
We’ll be exploring the connection between Singing and Audiation more in Chapter 14: Playing By Ear and looking at how exactly you can use the two together. In short, you can think of both as stepping stones between the music you have inside, and the music you express outside.
So even if right now you have no desire to sing in front of anybody, the combination of Audiation and Singing is a “dynamic duo” which lets you better process, understand and express music—something you’ll soon wonder how you ever did without!
Audiation Bridges Ear and Instrument
For a musician who has been focused exclusively on the “Hands” part of their H4 musicality, one huge step forwards is to start making connections to their “Hearing”.
This can mean learning to play by ear or improvise, but it can also be as simple as starting to make sure you actually really learn the sound of each piece you play, not just the instructions for which buttons to press when, on your instrument.
There are a couple of simple exercises shared below to help you get started with this. You’ll find it makes a remarkable difference to have a vivid mental representation of the music you’re playing (i.e. the ability to audiate it well). Suddenly it becomes easier to memorise, easier to play, easier to be expressive with. You’re actually getting “inside” the music rather than just reproducing notes robotically. It all starts with Audiation.
Audiation Bridges Sound and Notation
When you develop your Audiation in tandem with the Pitch and Rhythm ear skills covered later in the book, you develop the ability to look at written notation and immediately hear in your head how it should sound.
This is particularly exciting for singers, who can begin to “sight sing” music they’ve never heard before, just by looking at the sheet music. It’s also exciting for instrumentalists, since you no longer need to play through a piece dot-by-dot to find out how it sounds—you can simply look at the page, hear it in your mind, and know exactly what you’re aiming for when you pick up your instrument.
This connection works the other way around, too. When you develop both your Audiation and your “mental models” for Pitch and Rhythm, you’ll be able to hear music in your mind (whether remembering something you heard, or conjuring up something new) and write it down in notation, without needing to “hunt and peck” for notes on an instrument first.
Audiation Boosts Enjoyment and Creativity
As with so much of musicality, ultimately it all comes back to enjoyment. Improving your Audiation to the point of having a really vivid musical imagination allows you to hear beloved pieces almost as if they’re playing back in your mind. This brings music to life and enhances your listening experience.
We’ll be exploring the skill of “active listening” in Chapter 5: Active Listening, and it’s another skill which is intimately tied to Audiation. The more vividly you can imagine music in your mind, the more alert you’ll be to details in music you hear and play. Likewise, the more sophisticated and detailed your appreciation of music you hear and play, the easier it will become to hear those same depths and details in your musical imagination. You’ll find that Audiation becomes a really great way to assess your Active Listening abilities and vice-versa, simply by checking: “Can I ‘play back’ in my head everything I think I heard?”
This also has a clear knock-on effect to your musical creativity. The more restricted your musical imagination, the simpler your creative output will be. The more sophisticated your musical imagination becomes, the easier it will be to create rich, varied, and interesting music yourself.