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 or technique.I am constantly asked how I managed ‘to keep a straight face’ while playing the Spock character. In terms of actor’s craft it was easy. I’m always amazed at the speed and deftness with which a plumber fixes a leaky faucet. That’s his craft. Mine included emotional control and manipulation.I was so thoroughly immersed in the character that my weekends were a gradual trip back to emotional normalcy. Or as close as I could get to it. By Sunday afternoon I would become aware of a lessening of the Spock presence. I would begin to relax into a somewhat more responsive state.I am still affected by the character of Spock. Of course, the role changed my career. Or rather gave me one. It also affected me very deeply and personally, socially, psychologically, emotionally. To this day I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes, and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior.What started out as a welcome job to a hungry actor, has become a constant and ongoing influence in my thinking and lifestyle.After I presented this lengthy quote, I then compared Nimoy’s insights about acting and sculpting with how we audiate music. Here, with a few minor edits, is what I wrote:Nimoy writes about “projecting” a performance, that is, performing the play in his head. Haven’t you ever done that with music? Haven’t you ever “performed” a piece of music in your mind? Of course you have! What have you noticed at those moments? You may have noticed that the music in your mind was not proceeding at the same speed that it normally takes to perform it. You may have audiated a three-minute song in thirty seconds. You could do this because, when you audiate a piece of music, you don’t audiate every single note the composer wrote.This may seem strange to you. After all, when you perform a piece of music, you perform every note, and you do so in actual time. You may even memorize every note. But you don’t process every note. Your brain chooses the important stuff, the highlights, the essential pitches and durations that make the piece what it is—in your opinion. Of course, the tonal and rhythm patterns in a piece of music that you think are essential may not be the same patterns that I think are essential.What about the block of marble in the sculptor’s studio that Nimoy writes about? Several things are happening with that block of marble. The artist is seeing, visualizing, predicting the final product even before the actual work has begun. The same thing happens in music. If you’re actively listening to a piece of music, then you’re predicting what will happen next, even if you’ve never heard the music before!And what are your predictions based on? Your experience. Notice that Nimoy can “project” how he will perform from the first time he reads a script only because he has seen himself so many times on the screen. Think about how this connects with music. The more music you’ve heard and the larger your vocabulary of patterns in various tonalities and meters, and the more adept you are at manipulating those patterns, the better you can audiate. (How wonderful it would be if our students reached the point where they began asking, How is the piece of music I’m hearing now like the piece I heard last week? Last month? Last year?)Something else might be happening with that block of marble that Nimoy doesn’t talk about. Imagine the sculptor is half-finished with his work. Does he still visualize the same finished product he did at first? Probably not. In his mind, he has most likely made subtle adjustments so that his visualization is slightly different than it was when he started. As he looks at the block of marble in its constantly changing forms, he gains insight into what the work of art might eventually look like.So it is with music. The more we listen, the more we try to discern the overall structure of the piece we’re hearing. We might find ourselves saying, “Aha! The lydian mode. Where did that come from?” or “Wow! I never… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ericmbluestine.substack.com
