8 Ways to Develop Your Audiation Skills
The Power of Audiation in Music: Elevating Practice and Performance
Imagine being able to hear music in your mind with such clarity that it's as if it’s playing right in front of you. This skill, known as audiation, is an essential tool in a musician's toolbox, and one that enables a deeper understanding of music to enhance both practice and performance. This article will explore what audiation is, why it is significant in music, and how it can help musicians perform at their peak, and then I’ll provide 8 simple strategies to improve your audiation skills in the practice room.
Understanding Audiation
Audiation, a term coined by music education researcher Edwin E. Gordon in the 1970s, refers to the ability to hear and comprehend music even when no physical sound is present. It’s similar to how visualisation is the ability to see images in the mind's eye.
Audiation, however, is not the same as imitation or basic music recognition. It requires a much deeper, nuanced understanding of the music and its structure, and goes beyond simply copying someone else’s playing. In essence, audiation is the musical equivalent of thinking in language – it’s a proactive process.
“Audiation is to music what thought is to language”
Gordon goes on to further clarify audiation in his journal article “All about Audiation and Music Aptitudes”:
“Imitation, memory, and recognition are part of the audiation process. Alone, however, they are not audiation. Audiation takes place when we hear and understand in our minds music that we have just heard performed or have heard performed sometime in the past. When we merely recognize or imitate what we have heard, or memorise what we intend to perform, we live in the past. In audiation, the past lives in us.”
The Importance of Audiation for Practice and Performance
If audiation is seemingly so vital for musicians to develop, what are the benefits of developing my audiation skills?
“Sound itself is not music. Sound becomes music only through audiation, when, as with language, you translate the sounds in your mind to give them context. The meaning you give to these sounds will be different on different occasions, as well as different from that given to them by another person.”
Strengthening Musical Perception & Confidence
Audiation is not just about hearing music internally; it's about understanding it at a much deeper level. Weak or unclear audiation leads to uncertain, stressful, mistake-ridden performances lacking in vitality and creativity. Whereas strong audiation helps build a more detailed mental map of the music and allows musicians to anticipate how a piece should sound. This is crucial so that performers can execute all the musical elements with greater confidence and conviction, and help deliver a captivating and exciting performance.
Enhancing Musical Expression
With clear internal hearing, musicians can focus more on expression and less on the mechanics of playing. This ability creates a more efficient and effective learning environment, which enables greater clarity and progress in practice sessions. As a result, this leads to higher quality, more emotionally impactful performances.
“A musician who can audiate is able to bring musical meaning to notation. A musician who cannot audiate can only take theoretical meaning from notation”
Improving Memory and Sight-Reading
Musicians with strong audiation skills often find it easier to memorize music and sight-read. By hearing the music in their minds before playing, they can anticipate what comes next, making learning and performing pieces more efficient.
Increased Adaptability
Audiation enables musicians to be more adaptable and responsive in ensemble settings. By audiating, they can better anticipate and react to the musical decisions of their fellow performers, especially when something unexpected happens in a concert!
Facilitating Improvisation and Composition
Audiation is a vital tool for improvisers and composers. It enables them to experiment with musical ideas in their mind before a note is even played, allowing for more refined creativity and experimentation.
Mitigating Music Performance Anxiety
By internalizing the music through audiation, musicians can feel better prepared and cope more effectively when Music Performance Anxiety presents itself. This preparedness can alleviate some of the common fears associated with performance, and help musicians approach performing opportunities with greater clarity, certainty and confidence.
Types of audiation
Through Gordon’s research, he found that audiation fell into 8 different types that you can experiment with in your music practice. They are:
Type 1 – Listening to familiar or unfamiliar music.
Type 2 – Reading familiar or unfamiliar music.
Type 3 – Writing familiar or unfamiliar music from dictation.
Type 4 – Recalling and performing familiar music from memory.
Type 5 – Recalling and writing familiar music from memory.
Type 6 – Creating and improvising unfamiliar music while performing or in silence.
Type 7 – Creating and improvising unfamiliar music while reading.
Type 8 – Creating and improvising unfamiliar music while writing.
Stages of audiation
In addition to the different types of audiation, Gordon’s research also found that audiation occurs in various stages, often with several stages occurring together as a part of the learning process:
Stage 1 – Momentary retention
Stage 2 – Imitating and audiating tonal patterns and rhythm patterns and recognizing and identifying a tonal center and macrobeats
Stage 3 – Establishing objective or subjective tonality and meter
Stage 4 – Retaining in audiation tonal patterns and rhythm patterns that have been organized
Stage 5 – Recalling tonal patterns and rhythm patterns organized and audiated in other pieces of music
Stage 6 – Anticipating and predicting tonal patterns and rhythm processes
8 Ways to Develop Your Audiation Skills
So now that you know what audiation is and why it is important, here are 8 practical ways that you can develop your audiation skills in the practice room:
1. Start with Simple Melodies or a Single Note
The best way to start working on your audiation skills is by hearing simple songs or melodies in your head that you are already familiar with. Some tunes you could start with might be “Happy Birthday”, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, or your favourite piece of music that you like to play or listen to.
Try to hear every note and rhythm in your mind, paying attention to as much detail as possible. This will require you to adopt the same level of intense focus as if playing the piece on your instrument or when singing. This is not mindless practice, but focused and purposeful practice!
If you find it too difficult to hear a whole piece of music in your head, try hearing the first note of the piece instead, and build from there. Once you can hear the first note, add the next note…and then the next one, and so on…
2. Practise with Silent Reading
Next, take a simple piece of sheet music and try reading it silently. As you read, hear the music in your mind, including all the nuances of dynamics and articulation. Recognise which sections are easy to hear, and which parts are more challenging. Use this information to target specific note patterns or areas of your playing that may require further attention in your practice.
3. Use Call-and-Response Exercises
Play a short melody on your instrument, then repeat it in your mind. This call-and-response exercise helps reinforce the connection between what you hear externally and internally, and will slowly build your audiation abilities.
4. SING!
Singers must develop excellent audiation skills due to the nature of their instrument – their vocal cords are a part of their body and they must produce sound without any outside assistance. This means that instrumentalists can use their voices to significantly strengthen audiation as well, particularly when it comes to pitch recognition and intonation.
When singing, the sounds that you produce will have a direct relationship with your level of audiation. If your singing (or humming) is way off in comparison to what you want to sound like on your instrument, then chances are your audiation skills could be strengthened. Building on the call-and-response exercise #3, you can include sung repetitions before playing on your instrument to develop a much clearer and more refined understanding of the music.
To take this one step further, add a few minutes of sight-singing into your practice each day. This will get your brain working on overdrive and pitch perception skills up to expert levels in no time!
5. Incorporate Audiation in Daily Practice
Commit to making audiation a part of your regular practice routine. Before playing a piece, spend a few minutes hearing it in your mind. For each repetition, make sure to think about what you want to sound like before you start playing. This practice can dramatically improve your interpretation and performance, and help get the most out of every repetition that you do.
6. Engage in Active Listening
Listen to recordings and live performances actively. Try to sing, play along, or conduct in your mind, paying attention to the intricacies of the music. Pretend that you are the performer, and engage with all the elements in the music to deepen your understanding of the piece.
7. Experiment with Improvisation
Improvisation is a great way to develop audiation skills. Try improvising in your mind before you play, envisioning different melodic lines and harmonies, or create variations on your scales, technical exercises and etudes. Practising in this way will give you greater flexibility and adaptability in your playing, which are essential skills when performing on stage.
8. Utilize Technology
There are plenty of software and apps designed to help develop audiation skills. These tools often include exercises that focus on pitch recognition, interval training, and rhythmic understanding. You can find some examples on our Suggested Resources page.
Conclusion
Audiation is a powerful tool that goes beyond mere internal hearing; it is about understanding and anticipating music. Developing audiation skills can lead to more confident, expressive, and impactful performances. By incorporating audiation practices into your daily routine, you will be able to unlock a deeper level of musical understanding and communication, propelling you towards your highest performance capabilities. As the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein once said, "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." With audiation, musicians will be able to achieve this profound level of communication with much greater success.
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