Audiation: imagining sound

Every sound that is made on this instrument must be produced in advance within the imagination. Frédéric Duvernoy 1

Audiation2 refers to forming of a mental “image” of sound. You can audiate (or form a mental conception of) tone quality, pitch, articulation, phrasing and other aspects.


Thinking 2-3 tones ahead gives a nice focus, better flow. Student

Chapter Overview

In this chapter we will:

  • Explore the concept of Audiation/Voraushören
  • Gain insights into how audition fits into other processes of horn playing
  • See how other authors have developed similar ideas
  • Discuss qualities of successful audiation
  • Investigate pitfalls and mistakes

Successful Audiation is the opposite of impulsive, accidental, unconscious/habitual thought pattern that accompanies playing.

Creative Audiation

Audiation is always a creative process. You activate your cognition/knowledge.

Audiation Strategies

  • Audiating drone. Mental drone. You could use actual drone for practice
  • Audiating interval
  • Audiating chord
  • Audiating scale cluster

Think of the whole chord at once. Play a note and hear an octave above or below it (same for any other interval).

Audiation qualities

  • structured, strategic, flexible audiation (as a temporally separate thought)

Vigorous, energetic audiation

Playful imagination - (advanced) audiation strategy

Snake (game) - gå innom tonene, besøke tonene, finne hvilke av dem henger sammen. Snaken finner sammenhenger, bringer tonene sammen.

Challenge of putting things back together after breaking things down.

Separate sound production and audiation. They are not the same process. Sort of absent-mindedness when playing (?).

Audiation is effortful: it is surprising how much mental energy you need to exert.

Harmony Melody Gestures Key Pulse

Your ability and skill in this part of the process will determine your success (and contentment) as a performing musician. Your ability to imagine, to conceive of sound, will determine the success

Audiating the musical grid

  • Sense of tempo, pulse and subdivision belong audiation
  • Intonation belongs to audiation

How to train audiation?

  • Not giving up until you get a clear audiation and good alignment with production
  • Don’t go to the next note until you can audiate it

Learning Activity: Practice layers of audiation separately

There are many parameters in music making. To be able to think of all of them simultaneously can be difficult. Take things apart and audiate (imagine) sound timbre, then pitch, then rhythm separately etc.

Play scales imagining the chord

Learning activities

  • Separating audiation and listening: long tones
  • Thinking two beats ahead
  • Harmonic audiation (Voraushören)
  • Activating audiation - playing on the piano, and imitating, then audiating. Waking up the process.

Defining Audiation

  • Audiation - Thinking in sound
  • Imagining future sound
  • Imagining what should happen (imagining the result) and letting the rest flow
  • Gordon - loose usage
  • Voraushören

Why audiation?

For the lack of a better, and all inclusive word It shows the importance of mental, conceptual activity

Audiation in the wild

  • Forethought
  • Voraushören
  • Earmagination tm
  • The Third Hand

Sub-optimal audiation models. Issues

Habitual/minimal audiation. You get so used to the sound production, develop such muscle memory, and/or focus on many other things that, while still producing sound, the quality and intent are disappearing

Merging the sound production and audiation: “I go straight to playing”

Mixing up Listening with audiation: When Listening is not temporally separated from Audiation it might appear that what you hear is what you intend to produce. This is a vicious circle because you can always justify that your audiation is exactly matching the sound production, even though the audiation is very passive and subordinate to the other two aspects (Perception and Sound Production)

The antidote of impulsiveness is forethought

Student: start just playing, skip audiation. Good to remember the steps of playing.

Accidental sound production, jumping in. Impulsiveness

Common audiation mistakes

  • Audiation is stopping
  • Audiation is aligning with sound production, with “playing”
  • Audiation is imprecise
  • Coordination between audiation and sound production is imprecise
  • Sound production issues

In summary

References

  • Gordon
  • Natalie Douglass
  • Gary Karpinsky

Quotes

Gary Karpinsky: Aural skills acquisition

Aural Imagery prior to Sound production (page 156)

The five basic procedures discussed thus far in this chapter-establishment of collection, tonic, pulse, tempo, and meter-must all be performed in some external fashion (that is, via singing, tapping, slapping, or conducting) if they are to be assessed by teachers or peers. However, it is important for these procedures to be internalized as soon as possible. Before performing, musicians should be able to establish a key or set a tempo without making a sound. The ability to auralize these procedures is valuable not only in actual performing situations but also for everyday music-reading tasks. Anyone reading metric tonal music must be able to auralize key and meter before beginning to interpret and understand the individual notes.

And the ability to auralize the sounds of the individual notes is equally important. Proficient readers scan ahead, taking in musically meaningful groups of notes and hearing them internally before producing their sounds.


Dale Clevenger: Mr Herseth, what are you thinking while playing?

Bud Herseth: The next note

This anecdote illustrates an idea that doesn’t have a proper name. It is described in the literature as rather important, yet it is not often clear what is meant by it, and what role it has.

Audiation roughly refers to the idea of imagining sound prior to producing it.

Although the term might be unfamiliar, the idea itself is old. Because different authors and pedagogues have used different names and descriptions, the idea has sometimes become lost.

Fill your head with sound (and the content of the consciousness)

“Anticipation - which is extremely important - so that’s not to be taken by surprise” Menuhin Lesson 1

Literature and other sources

Gordon

Duvernoy

Kaplan: The Third Hand

Issues with Audiation

Is it always creative? Productive? Or is there such a thing as reproductive hearing/audiation?

Inner ear, inner hearing, audiation?

Is audiation hearing? Types of perception. The content of consciousness.

???

The ability to imagine the sound will determine if you will be able to produce it. But it is maybe also important to say that you can get away without explicitly thinking about this part

Audiation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMqOOokv4TM

Action-conceptualization strategies

  • structured audiation

  • creative audiation. Wandering.

  • Think ahead

  • Audiate the other note

  • Audiation snake

  • Imagination

  • Forestillingsevne

  • Herme etter


  1. Duvernoy is quoted by Randy C. Gardner in “Mastering The Horn’s Low Register” ↩︎

  2. The term Audiation was coined by Edwin E. Gordon in his Music Learning Theory ↩︎

By Julius Pranevičius