What if silently hearing a note is not entirely silent—and not entirely auditory?

When I imagine a note very clearly, I do not experience sound alone.

There is also an extraordinarily subtle physical sensation around the voice. Nothing audible happens. I am not consciously singing. Yet it can feel almost as though the vocal cords are participating in the imagined pitch—a kind of ghost of singing accompanying the sound in my mind.

For years, I simply regarded this as part of my own experience of inner hearing.

Then I encountered research on covert singing.

A ghost of singing

Tim Pruitt, Andrea Halpern and Peter Pfordresher placed surface electromyography sensors around participants' laryngeal and facial muscles while they imagined sounds before singing them. During auditory imagery, they found greater activity in the laryngeal and lip muscles than during visual imagery. They describe this peripheral activity as subvocalization or covert singing.

That does not mean that the sensation I experience is necessarily the same physiological phenomenon. I have never measured it.

But it raises a beautiful question:

When we "hear" music inwardly, how much of the body may already be participating?

Another study approaches the question from a different direction.

Rebecca Gelding and colleagues measured brain activity while participants performed a musical pitch-imagery task without overt movement. Auditory and sensorimotor regions were closely coordinated, and at the onset of imagery their analysis indicated influence from a sensorimotor region toward an auditory region.

Perhaps, then, the familiar expression "the mind's ear" is useful but incomplete.

Musical imagery may be profoundly multimodal.

What a pianist notices

And for a pianist, this possibility becomes particularly interesting.

When I first began developing inner hearing, imagining even an individual pitch was difficult. Gradually the representation became richer: pitch acquired timbre and movement; several notes could coexist; harmony, dynamics, voicing and tonal colour could become part of what was internally experienced.

But sound was not developing alone.

Movement was entering the image with it.

Eventually, looking at notation could evoke not only what I wanted to hear, but something of how that sound moved before my hands touched the instrument.

And there was another development that should not be confused with the first.

I began deliberately cultivating inner singing between the notes.

A note itself could be imagined. But consecutive notes could also be connected inwardly through an inaudible glissando and resistance. The expressive event was no longer confined to two sounding points on the piano. Something continuous could be experienced between them.

Two things that should not be confused

This distinction now seems important to me.

  • There may be a subtle vocal participation accompanying the imagination of the note itself.
  • And there is the deliberately cultivated inner singing that creates the journey between notes.

They may or may not share the same underlying mechanisms. I do not know.

But both make it difficult to think of musical imagery as a little recording playing somewhere inside the head.

Perhaps an internally imagined musical event is closer to a silent preparation for action: auditory, vocal, kinaesthetic and motor dimensions participating in different proportions, depending on the musician and on what is being imagined.

A more precise question

That possibility also changes an old pedagogical question.

Instead of asking only:

Can you hear the music before you play it?

perhaps we should eventually be able to ask something much more precise:

What exactly happens in you when you hear it?

  • Do you experience only pitch?
  • Does the imagined note have timbre?
  • Does it move?
  • Does your vocal apparatus seem to participate?
  • Can you experience continuity between consecutive notes?
  • Does the imagined sound already contain something of the movement through which you will produce it?
  • And—perhaps most intriguingly—can each of these dimensions be deliberately developed?

The scientific literature does not yet allow me to answer that final question for the particular progression I have observed in my own playing and teaching.

But it has given me a new language for asking it.

Perhaps inner hearing was never only about the ear.