Exercises to Develop Audiation

Compared to most other skills of musicality, Audiation is more about simply making it a habit than following a step-by-step process or curriculum. So here we will suggest a number of easy ideas you can start incorporating into your music learning and have in mind as you progress through the rest of this book.

Level 1 (Short-Term Musical Memory) Exercises

Here are four contexts where you can start developing your short-term musical memory:

1. When you’re learning a new piece of music. With each measure or phrase you tackle, take a moment to try hearing it back in your mind’s ear before the next time you play (or sing) it.
   TIP: One fun way to do this is to select certain measures as “inner hearing only”, and when you reach that measure stop playing/singing and instead hear it in your mind’s ear before continuing on as normal. Gradually increase the number of measures you do this with. If you’re playing with a backing track, try muting the track for a measure or two and imagine in your mind’s ear what you would play during those measures. When you unmute the backing, are you still in time? This is a great way to dial in your “inner metronome” and time-keeping accuracy.

2. When listening to music you enjoy, hit “pause” and see if you can recreate in your mind’s ear the passage you just heard.
3. When practicing Playing By Ear or Improvisation, each time you do an exercise, take a moment to try hearing what you intend to play in your mind’s ear first. As you’ll be hearing about in the dedicated chapters on those skills, this “bridge” has an enormously positive effect on your results, as well as continuing to build that core Audiation ability itself.
4. When memorising new music, make sure you are memorising not just how to play it, but also the sound of it, through audiating.

The more opportunities you find to take a moment and listen back in your mind to the music you just heard, the faster your musical memory will improve.

With each of these, remember you can gradually increase the challenge by:

1. A. Starting with rhythm only, then adding pitch (or vice-versa)
2. Increasing the complexity of the melody (the range of notes used, the sophistication of the scale, the rhythmic complexity, etc.)
3. Extending the length of passage. Start with just a few notes, extend to a whole phrase, then a whole section, etc.

Level 2 (Melody Audiation) Exercises

Level 2 is about audiating melodies which you haven’t just heard a moment before. This might be when sight-reading from sheet music, audiating each melody before playing or singing it aloud, or it might be recalling a melody that’s familiar (but haven’t just heard).

This is a great one to practice with your existing repertoire. Any time you’re pulling out a song you know well, pick sections to audiate before (or instead of) playing them out loud.

Try to be precise with rhythm and pitch. Vividly imagine each note in turn. The more you do this, the easier Audiation becomes.

Level 2 Audiation sets you up with a “mental gym” for doing Ear Training exercises. It’s one thing to practice recognising Intervals, Solfa or Chords which you’ve just heard. It’s another to generate those examples in your mind’s ear and perform the same recognition tasks!

Audiation can also provide an extremely useful “middle step” for all Ear Training, giving you the chance to “check your answers” in your mind’s ear. For example, I remember when I was struggling to distinguish between the Intervals called Perfect Fourths and Perfect Fifths. If I simply listened, then guessed, I really had a hard time with it. When I started to take a moment to imagine in my mind’s ear what a Perfect Fourth and a Perfect Fifth would sound like, it was suddenly easy to check which of the two I had just heard, and get the answer right. More on this in Chapter 14: Playing By Ear.

Level 2 is also where we can start connecting Audiation with creativity. As you discover the creative frameworks later in the book, keep in mind that they can all be practiced in your mind’s ear.

This is why we sometimes refer to Audiation as the “secret music practice skill”. With Audiation you can be improving your musical ear and your improvisation chops while standing in line waiting for a bus! You can even take it one stage further with…

Mental Play

If you want to turbo-boost your Audiation practice, try Mental Play. I came across this idea for the first time in Chuan C. Chang’s wonderful book The Fundamentals Of Piano Practice.

The idea is simple: while you play back the music in your mind’s ear, also visualise yourself playing it.

Just like Audiation itself, this is something that sounds easy, but might shock you with its difficulty at first! It really reveals how much you might be relying on autopilot and “muscle memory”, or on the notation to tell you which notes to play, rather than having formed a firm “mental model” of the music.

To be able to really feel yourself playing the part, while you imagine the musical sounds it creates, also has a profound effect on how free and confident your actual playing will be.

So there are three huge benefits to this simple exercise:

Firstly, it makes sure your “mental representation” of how to play the piece really is dialed in. Just like Audiation itself, you’ll probably start finding that sections you thought you knew are actually quite fuzzy when you try to conjure them up in your imagination. For example, you’re able to play a certain passage, but when you try Mental Play you realise you don’t consciously know the fingering pattern. This reveals that when you’re actually playing it, your brain is still guessing to some extent, opening you up to making mistakes at that point in the music. More on this in Chapter 6: Superlearning.

Secondly, it gives you the same kind of “mental gym” for instrument playing as mentioned above for ear skills. You can actually try out different fingerings, or really slow down a section and make sure you’ve got it dialed-in. If there’s a passage that’s troubling you, try doing Mental Play on it a few times between your regular instrument practice sessions. I guarantee you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to actually play it when you next set fingers to instrument!

This goes for Singing too. Again, that deep biological connection with your singing voice means it’s the epitome of really feeling what it’s like to perform it, even without making a single sound out loud.

Research has proven that this kind of imagined practicing has a clear tangible effect on your progress * See, for example, “Mental practice promotes motor anticipation: evidence from skilled music performance” by Bernardi et al., Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013 which presents a relevant study as well as citing various other studies which demonstrate the impact of Mental Play. . And you can probably imagine how valuable it is to be able to practice “that tricky bit” 50 or 100 times while waiting in line at a shop or walking down the street!

Coming back to when I first learned about this technique in the book for piano, at the time I was really struggling with integrating the right- and left-hand parts. The book revealed that going slowly and very gradually combining the two was the key to success, but it also added this idea of Mental Play. I found that trying to imagine what both hands were playing, note by note, slow enough to get it all right, was shockingly effective compared to just “brute forcing” trying to play the two parts at once.

Finally, the third huge benefit is that it develops your instrument skills and Audiation skills in tandem. That’s why has become one of my top tips for any instrument player to use Mental Play as a way to find extra practice time. It works really well, and it’s a double win, because you’re practicing your instrument and repertoire—but of course you’re also levelling up your Audiation skills. So, the more you use Mental Play in your learning, the better you’ll get, and that impact will increase over time.

Level 3 (Full Music Audiation) Exercises

Level 3 is about “full music”—in the sense of a full arrangement rather than “the full piece” (though that’s also interesting to aim for!). Here we’re looking to fill in the harmony, the rhythm section, each and every instrument, the distinct timbres and/or audio production being used, etc. The goal is that your imagined version of the music is as close as possible to a full recorded or performed version.

In its simplest form this would mean taking a solo instrumental piece, for example an unaccompanied flute or saxophone melody, but starting to really vividly hear the sound of that instrument in your mind, not just having a sense of the note pitches. Naturally most of the music around us each day features multiple instruments and all kinds of detail, so you’ll want to extend this ability towards those fuller, more complex tracks too.

The key exercise here is to combine Audiation and Active Listening. We’ll be going in depth on that skill in Chapter 5: Active Listening. For now you just need to know the overall idea, which is to listen to music while zeroing in your attention on a particular aspect of it. That could be a certain instrument, a certain part, the rhythms, audio effects, or any other component of the music. You’ll be learning the 4-D Active Listening framework and a particular approach to help with this.

When it comes to Level 3 Audiation, the trick is simply to alternate Active Listening with Audiation.

So each time you listen through to a track practicing Active Listening and really paying attention to one particular aspect of the music, you then take a moment afterwards to try to re-create either that particular aspect in your mind’s ear, or the full track with that aspect more vividly filled in.

For example, supposing you’re working on Michael Jackson’s classic track “Thriller”. You might start out with only Level 1 Audiation ability, able to hear back the vocal part in your short-term memory (and perhaps even that would require some repeats, to get the lyrics down and be confident in the pitches you’re hearing). Next you might work on Level 2 for the vocal melody, being able to recall the vocal part in your mind’s ear even if you haven’t heard the track recently. Level 3 would then be about starting to fill in some of the instrumental parts, perhaps the drums, bassline, horns, and so on.

Again, a word of warning: don’t be discouraged if this is hard at first! To be consciously aware of multiple parts at once is a real challenge for most musicians in Active Listening to begin with, and carrying that across to Audiation even more so! Like most musical challenges though, the benefits are proportional to the initial difficulty, so take your time and be patient with yourself.

Remember the old adage “What’s the best way to eat an elephant?” Don’t expect yourself to hit “play” on your mental Walkman and instantly hear the full, rich detail of a track from beginning to end. Start with small sections, start with one or two aspects at a time, and gradually build it up. You might like to start with simpler arrangements, for example an acoustic performance by a singer-songwriter with just vocals and guitar rather than a Beach Boys or Pink Floyd extravaganza ;)

The important thing to know is that although it may take time to do this for a single track, the process will accelerate the more you practice it. Eventually, you’ll find that your default level of Audiation is a solid Level 3, and you’re able to easily and quickly conjure up rich and vivid representations of music in your mind’s ear.