Audiation Lecture 1: An Overview of the Stages

I want to start off with a disclaimer, that in this lecture, I will not dig very deeply into each stage of audiation. The purpose of this lecture is to whet your appetites for future lectures during which I will go deeply into each stage. This lecture is the first in an 8-part series about audiation, a term coined in the mid-1970s by the music psychologist Edwin Gordon. My purpose in presenting this series is to raise questions and offer insights about the audiation process that Dr. Gordon only touched on, or perhaps, didn’t consider. I want to start my talk today by quoting the folk singer Pete Seeger who wrote this back in 1973: “Musicians need, in the beginning, to train their ears, their vocal cords, or their hands, and to develop the sense of music that tells them when to sing what.” — from Pete Seeger’s book Henscratches and Flyspecks: How to Read Melodies from Songbooks in Twelve Confusing Lessons. I love Pete’s insight here: This is a terrific start to understanding audiation. But it’s just a start. So what is audiation exactly? If I told you that you audiate music when you “inner hear” it with comprehension, you’d probably tell me my definition is too broad and not much help. Here is the way Dr. Gordon, in 2012, defined the term: Audiation means: “Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind [the] sound of music [that is] not, or may never have been, physically present.” (Gordon, 2012). (For clarity, I inserted the words “the” and “that is.”) This definition stresses the point that, as you listen to music, the sound in your mind is not physically present because it has already become part of the past. To which I respond: Yes, that seems to be true, but it’s trivial. (In my opinion, a more important point about audiation is that the music in our minds does not proceed at performance speed because we audiate only essential pitches and durations. You’ll hear more about essentialness in Lecture 2.) For now, let me define the term audiation a bit differently: We audiate a piece of music when we mentally organize its musical elements—separately and in tandem—so that we may understand how the piece develops. This definition is pretty good, but it’s incomplete because audiation is a process – and you can’t define a process, because a process by its very nature, won’t stand still! You can only explain what happens as the process unfolds. When I wrote my book The Ways Children Learn Music back in the summer of 1994, I included a short chapter on audiation; and I made the deliberate choice not to bog down the reader with too much detail about the stages and types. I remember thinking to myself — I’ll write a quick, early chapter on audiation; and then I’ll freely sprinkle the word audiation throughout the rest of the book because the reader will know, basically, what it means. My goal was to explain, early in the book, what audiation is and what it’s not. It’s not inner hearing. It’s not aural imagery. It’s not memorization. And so on. Arguing those points was easy. But linking audiation with performance technique … that was more challenging. How we audiate a piece of music affects how we perform it; and our performance of the piece may impel us to subtly change how we audiate it. How was I to make that point in a way that grabbed the reader’s attention? To cut through that problem, I turned to the book I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy from 1975. Nimoy explains in this delightful memoir how artists visualize art, and how they make use of their craft to produce art. Nimoy wrote the following: I’ve played enough roles and have seen myself enough times that I can project my performance from the time I first read the script. I suspect that it’s similar to what happens when a block of marble arrives at a sculptor’s studio. When he first looks at it, sees the image inside the block and then starts to chip away to reveal it to the eyes of others, the ability to see it is his visionary talent. The ability to chip away the excess is his craft