What If You Cannot Hear Music in Your Mind?

There is a question musicians are rarely asked:

When you look at a note, do you actually hear it?

Not whether you know what the note is. Not whether you could play it. Not whether you would recognise it if someone else played it.

But whether, in silence, you can produce an internal experience of its sound.

For much of my early musical life, the distinction would hardly have made sense to me.

I was studying piano professionally in Moscow. I learned substantial repertoire, performed in large halls and participated successfully in competitions.

And yet my internal experience of music was extraordinarily limited.

If I looked at a written note, I could not simply hear its pitch in my mind. Even distinguishing or reproducing pitches inwardly could be enormously difficult.

From the outside, this created a peculiar contradiction:

I could play music that I could barely hear before I played it.

Only much later did I encounter a word that made this experience particularly interesting to reconsider: anauralia.

What is anauralia?

Anauralia describes absent — or, depending on how the term is being used and measured, extremely limited — voluntary auditory imagery: difficulty intentionally generating sounds in the "mind's ear."

The term was proposed in 2021 by Rish Hinwar and Anthony Lambert at the University of Auckland, in a study of auditory and visual imagery and their absence. It is often discussed alongside aphantasia, the absence of voluntary visual imagery. But the two need not occur together. Someone may have vivid visual imagery and little auditory imagery, or the reverse.

And musical ability makes the phenomenon especially intriguing.

One might intuitively assume that musicians must possess vivid auditory imagery. After all, musicians routinely speak of "hearing before playing," of audiation and the inner ear.

Yet emerging research suggests a more complicated picture.

Some people reporting anauralia have nevertheless developed considerable musical abilities. At the same time, group-level research discussed by Professor Lambert and colleagues suggests that people with anauralia report substantially lower musical engagement and more difficulty with abilities such as singing in tune and synchronising with music.

So the relationship between musicianship and inner hearing is not straightforward.

And that raises a question that interests me much more than the label itself.

How can someone play well without hearing clearly inside?

I know from experience that it is possible.

But possible and efficient are not the same thing.

Before developing my inner hearing, I could prepare demanding repertoire. An audience could hear a convincing performance.

What they could not see was the process required to produce it.

I depended enormously on physical repetition. Preparing a piece could require hours of practice every day for months.

The piano itself supplied information that was not yet sufficiently available before playing:

I moved. The instrument sounded. I listened. I evaluated. I corrected. And I repeated.

Again and again.

The result could eventually become convincing. But the route towards it was extraordinarily expensive.

Then the direction began to reverse

At thirteen, I began deliberately working on inner hearing.

The transformation did not happen suddenly.

First came the difficult task of internally producing an individual pitch.

But eventually I discovered that pitch itself was only the beginning.

• An imagined note could acquire a particular sound texture.
• That sound could contain movement.
• Several notes could coexist.
• Individual voices within a polyphonic texture could become independently audible.
• Harmony could become internally experienced rather than merely understood analytically.
• Dynamics and voicing could exist before the keys were touched.
• And through inner singing, the apparently empty space between consecutive piano notes could acquire continuity through glissando and resistance.

This is why the curriculum I eventually developed does not simply instruct a pianist to "hear before playing." The capacity itself is approached progressively: the Inner Musical Ear is followed by Sound Texture and Intonation; later work differentiates Harmony, Dynamics, Voicing and Articulations before moving into Musical Speech, Phrasing and Form.

Something much larger than pitch imagery was gradually being constructed.

And playing changed with it

This was perhaps the most consequential part of the experience.

As the internal representation became clearer, my relationship with the instrument changed.

Previously:

play → hear → evaluate → correct

Increasingly:

imagine → move → play → compare

The difference may look small on paper.

For me, it was enormous.

What had previously required months of physical work could sometimes be prepared in roughly ten to fourteen days, depending on the complexity and speed of the programme.

Practice also felt fundamentally different. Instead of searching physically for the music through repetition, I increasingly knew what I was trying to realise before the movement began.

The principle can be expressed very simply:

You play because you hear — not the other way around.

But I arrived at that sentence only because I knew intimately what the other way around felt like.

Does anauralia prevent musicianship?

Apparently not.

And perhaps that is precisely what makes it so interesting.

A musician can possess many sophisticated capacities that are easy to confuse with auditory imagery:

• You may understand harmony.
• You may recognise pitch accurately when you hear it.
• You may know what a phrase should do.
• You may possess highly trained motor memory.
• You may read notation fluently.
• You may reproduce something you have heard.
• You may even perform convincingly.

None of these necessarily tells us exactly what you experience when the instrument becomes silent.

Perhaps we have sometimes treated "musical ear" as though it were a single faculty when it is actually a collection of very different capacities.

But can auditory imagery be developed?

This is where my experience leaves the existing question and enters another one.

If someone has weak auditory imagery, is that simply how their mind works? Or can the internal representation itself change profoundly through training?

I cannot answer that scientifically from my own history or from the experience of my students.

What I can say is narrower and more concrete.

The internal musical experience available to me today is radically different from the one I remember as a young pianist. And I have observed pianists deliberately develop capacities that were initially unavailable to them through the exercises I teach.

That does not establish what neurological category any of us belonged to, nor does it prove that congenital anauralia can necessarily be "cured." Those would be much stronger claims than the evidence allows.

But it does make the developmental question impossible for me to ignore.

Because perhaps there is an enormous territory between:

"I cannot hear it."

and

"I can hear it."

Perhaps an inner musical representation can acquire dimensions one by one:

• Pitch.
• Timbre.
• Movement.
• Polyphony.
• Harmony.
• Dynamics.
• Voicing.
• Continuity between notes.
• And eventually the bodily experience associated with bringing that imagined music into sound.

Then the interesting question is no longer simply whether someone possesses auditory imagery.

It becomes:

What can the mind's ear learn to hear?

And perhaps, for musicians, an even more consequential question follows:

How does the way we practise change when it can hear more?