Journal · Video

What Happens in Your Mind When You Read Music? | Inner Hearing & Audiation

11 min 46 sec ·

This video accompanies the Journal essay — When You Look at a Musical Score, What Happens in Your Mind? — from The PianoWell System. Watch it here, then read the full essay for the complete argument and detailed study.

About this video

What happens in a pianist’s mind between seeing a note and playing it? Research into visuotonal modality transfer and notational audiation suggests that silently reading musical notation can transform visual information into internally heard sound — and for a pianist, that inner hearing is where expression and technique begin.

Read the full essay

Visuotonal modality transfer, notational audiation, and the hidden step between notation and performance.