As noted above, Audiation is a broad and varied skill which has connections and involvement throughout your musicality. It’s not an easy thing to measure or evaluate Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory does define a detailed classification system for different types and stages of Audiation. However this covers not only the “musical imagination” but also extensive musical understanding, incorporating abilities we will cover later in this book as belonging to Relative Pitch and Rhythm skills. .
Here’s a simple 3-level system you can keep in mind, to help you understand different degrees of Audiation:
- The first level is just being able to remember in your short-term memory, roughly how a brief passage of music went.
- The second level is being able to vividly recreate a melody in your mind’s ear, from long-term memory or by looking at sheet music.
- And the third level is recreating in rich, vivid detail, the entirety of a musical recording or arrangement.
Progressing through these levels will push your pitch, rhythm and harmony skills, as well as your awareness of instrumentation, audio production, form, and all the other facets of music we’ll explore in Chapter 5: Active Listening. It extends you in all directions at once.
As beautiful and varied as music is, that’s how beautiful and varied your audiation skill becomes. It’s a great way to continually stretch yourself as a musician.
These levels can be used to self-assess your overall audiation abilities. They can also (more usefully) be used to approach audiating any new piece of music. You can start out just seeing what you can audiate back immediately after hearing or playing it, then progress to a “Level 2” audiation of it after some time has passed, then combine it with some Active Listening practice to start really fleshing out your mental playback for Level 3.
Let’s look in more detail at each of the three levels, and then some exercises you can use to start developing each.
Level 1: Short-Term Musical Memory
Your auditory memory is, in some ways, already really strong. Can you remember the “Happy Birthday” song? Or “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star”? Can you remember any TV commercials or TV show theme songs from when you were a kid?
The auditory memory is one of our strongest types of memory. And yet, when it comes to using it for concrete musical tasks, we can find ourselves struggling much sooner than expected.
I remember back in my school days, the one of the few parts of the “aural skills” section of my instrument exams which I could easily pass was “clap back this rhythm.”
I’ve found that most people who’ve been learning an instrument for a year or two can clap back a basic rhythm fairly well, if it’s a measure or two long (think 5-8 seconds). Once it’s longer than that, they will often struggle, even if the rhythm is still quite basic. This indicates they are reaching the limits of their short-term musical memory.
Typically singing or humming back a short melody is a little harder than purely-rhythmic patterns—but again, the limiting factor tends to be the length of the melody more than its complexity. There’s plenty of work that can be done to improve your sense of Relative Pitch and ability to audiate melodies accurately, but it’s likely that the first limiting factor for your Audiation will, in fact, be the length of your short-term musical memory.
In Level 1, we’re just practicing audiation with very short sections of music which we’ve just heard, so that our short-term musical memory can assist us in recreating the sounds in our mind.
Level 2: Audiating Melodies
The next level we define is audiating melodies, meaning hearing one note at a time in your mind’s ear. Just a single note-by-note melody, nothing more complex than that, but working with longer passages than in Level 1, so that we’re going beyond our immediate short-term musical memory.
We’re not worrying about what instrument it is, the chords underneath, or the details of the recording. We’re really just thinking about “what is the sequence of notes in that melody?”
Stop reading for a moment, and see if you can hear the melody of “Happy Birthday” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in your head. Then try something a little less familiar, maybe a piece you’re working on playing, or some other song you listened to in the past few days.
You might find that you can hear the melody vividly—or that certain parts are a little fuzzy. You might well find that you can hear the words in your mind, but actually you’re not really hearing the different pitches clearly (or vice-versa!)
Many of our members at Musical U have found it disconcerting to realise that they actually can’t “play back” the music they’re working on in their mind’s ear. However (remember Growth Mindset!) this immediately provides a wonderful opportunity, as it proves to have been the hidden limiter for their playing from memory, playing by ear, playing expressively, and more. Applying focused effort on developing this ability suddenly frees them up to new levels of ability in several other areas.
This is really the crux of Audiation for most musicians. If you can nail this, you’re winning.
Level 3: Audiating Full Musical Passages
Once you can easily audiate melodies, the natural next step is to expand to harmonies and full arrangements.
This is a big change, and it is closely related to Active Listening, where one important skill to develop is what we might call “vertical listening”, where you’re able to be aware of multiple musical parts happening simultaneously.
At first you can start trying to hear the tonality (major vs. minor) of the harmony which goes along with the melody. Then perhaps adding the bassline movement, or the details of the chord voicing.
Personally, a gateway for me here was barbershop, close harmony singing, and 4-part choral harmony. At first I could only remember and audiate my own vocal part, but over time and with practice, I was able to become aware of all the other parts while listening, and then start being able to “play them back” in my mind too. To this day, putting on a Quebe Sisters track and simply paying careful attention to each of the three vocal parts at once—or doing the same purely in my mind’s ear—is a musical activity which brings me inexplicable levels of joy.
The other direction here is in terms of the audio production. For example, not just hearing the notes of a guitar solo, but really hearing vividly the tone and timbre of the guitar, the effects used, and so on. Or the stereo mix, to actually hear in your mind’s ear that there’s a guitar over here and the hi-hat over there and so on.
Taken to its fullest, imagine for example if you wanted to compose or conduct an orchestral arrangement. Without strong Audiation skills, you would need to play around and experiment in your arrangement software or DAW, or rely on the full orchestral score to orient yourself while conducting. With strong “Level 3” Audiation you would be able to conjure up the full, vivid music in your mind, and bring it out into the world from there directly.