This article was written for Paducah Parenting magazine.
Audiation - Music in the Mind
Recently when working with a class of 5-year old children, I put a pattern of music notes on a
staff and challenged the students to sing the resulting song. Although they had never heard
the song before, they were able to flawlessly per­form the pattern of notes. Later I was talking
to a colleague about optimum musical learning and I referenced this class. "How are they
able to sight sing at such a young age?" she won­dered. "Are they an exceptional group of
musically gifted children?" This led to a discussion of the process of audiation - the
experience of hearing music in our minds even when there is no music present. As an aside,
she expressed her doubt that the word appeared in the dictionary. Now it was my turn to
wonder, for this term is so prevalent in all the recent music education journals. I have since
checked my copy of Webster's and realized she was right ... about the word being in the
dictionary that is. Evidently, "audiation" is a buzzword that has come about as a result of the
last 15 years of musical education research.
So just what does this word mean? It is our musical intelligence at work. It is similar to the
way we use our visual intelligence to create images of objects or persons while our eyes are
closed. It is also akin to the linguistic intelligence thinking in words or sentences without
actually speaking out load. On the whole, it is a multifaceted and complex process, but it is
basic to all kinds of music thinking. Without audiation, musical growth is impaired, if not
impossible.
Each person begins to develop the ability to audiate music with many different types of
listening experiences as well as music-making experiences. As stated by Lili M. Levinowitz
and Kenneth K. Guilmartin in their publication Music and Your Child, "A constant spiral of
exposure through listening followed by experimentation through musical play will create an
excellent foundation on which to build a rich musical vocabulary. This will then help the
musical thinking process of audiation to be possible."
In the past, we as music teachers have approached music learning without implementing
this idea of audiation. Instead of starting with the experiences of listening to music and
creating our own music, we have shown a page of printed music to a new student and tried
to help them interpret the visual symbols to produce the correct sounds associated with
those symbols. While this can be successful, it is not the most natural way of learning. In
addition, it is certainly not the best way to teach a student who lacks the proper foundation
of musical listening and exploration prior to starting formal les­sons. Instead, a student
should be encouraged at a young age to hear and respond with singing and movement to a
piece, and then discern melodic patterns from the piece and copy a performance of them,
all the while comparing their attempts at producing music to the model performance.
Repeatedly doing this builds audiation skills.
Since the research now supports a different type of teaching, music educators are no longer
waiting until students are cognitively able to read and interpret the visual symbols of music
before starting lessons. Music studios such as the Harmony Road Music School strive to
form partnerships between certified early childhood music educators and parents to lay a
proper music foundation and fill a home environment with music listening and exploration
activities. This partnership can begin as early as infancy since it is never too early to start
when the materials and teaching are age and developmentally appropriate. And even if a
student is a teenager or adult when beginning music lessons, audiation should be a goal of
the experience. All music training should be about helping the student learn more than just
how to perform a song. It should be about helping the student hear the song without playing it
or singing it.
Whether or not the definition of "audiation" appears in the dictionary, the practice of
audiation is now a more regular occurrence in my teaching. It is more the norm for a class of
5-year old children to be able to correctly sing or play some written music without ever having
heard it. These children have reached a level of musical maturity never before thought
possible for this age, save only by children who were considered extremely gifted.
I like to think they are gifted. Because they have had listening experiences coupled with
experimentation of creating sounds to match the music they heard, and because the visu­al
representation of music was introduced only after that con­text, they are able to share the gift
of music with me, their parents, and friends.