A pianist looks at a note.
What happens next?
The obvious answer seems to be: the pianist plays it.
But there may be an entire internal event between seeing the notation and touching the instrument—one so familiar to accomplished musicians that it is easy to overlook.
The visual symbol can become sound.
Researchers have a striking term for this transformation: visuotonal modality transfer.
The written symbol begins to be heard
In a 2014 neuroimaging study, Christian Hoppe and colleagues described silent music reading as a particularly interesting example of cross-modal transfer. Visual information representing musical notes was held in working memory and transformed into corresponding tonal information. During this task, activity shifted away from visual regions toward auditory regions, with the effect more pronounced in participants with musical expertise.
In other words, the written symbol was no longer functioning merely as something seen.
It had begun to become something heard.
Notation can evoke an internal sound
An earlier study by Warren Brodsky and colleagues approached the phenomenon from another direction.
Expert musicians silently read musical notation and were subsequently asked to recognise melodies contained within what they had read. The researchers called the phenomenon notational audiation: silent reading of musical notation that results in auditory imagery.
But there was another intriguing finding.
When the researchers interfered with the musicians' phonatory system during silent score reading, their performance deteriorated more than under other interference conditions. The authors proposed that notational audiation involves not only auditory imagery but also kinesthetic-like phonatory processes.
This begins to make silent score reading look considerably less silent.
A musician may see the notation, hear something internally, and engage something resembling covert vocal production—all without producing an audible note.
But what exactly do we hear?
This is where the research question becomes especially interesting for piano pedagogy.
Being able to convert notation into an internally represented pitch is one thing.
But a pianist's musical intention contains considerably more than pitch.
A written note can imply a particular sound texture. It belongs to harmony. It carries dynamic direction. It may be foreground or background within a voicing. It exists within a phrase and a larger form. And between one note and the next, the pianist may internally experience continuity rather than two disconnected acoustic events.
The question therefore changes.
It is no longer simply:
Can I hear this note when I look at it?
It becomes:
How much musical information can the notation evoke internally before I play?
This distinction has occupied me for many years.
My own inner hearing was initially remarkably weak. Despite advanced musical training, I struggled to hear even individual written pitches internally. I therefore had to approach something that is often assumed rather than taught: how does one actually develop this transformation from notation into internal musical experience?
What emerged was not one sudden acquisition.
The internal image became progressively more differentiated.
First a note could become internally audible. Later its sound quality could become more specific. Connections between notes could acquire an internally sung continuity. Harmony, dynamics and voicing could gradually become imaginable rather than merely intellectually understood.
Eventually, looking at notation could evoke something much richer than pitch.
It could evoke a musical event.
From sound to movement
There may be another transformation hidden inside this process.
Musical imagery research increasingly describes musical representation as multimodal rather than exclusively auditory. And the phenomenon of notational audiation itself appears to recruit covert phonatory processes.
For the pianist, this raises a further question:
At what point does the sound imagined from notation begin to organise the movement that will produce it?
This is central to how I understand mental practice.
Rather than beginning with movement and listening afterwards to discover what sound it produced, practice can increasingly begin with an internal musical target. The imagined sound and its movement exist before execution; physical action becomes the means through which that internal representation is realised. This relationship between sound imagination and physical execution is developed explicitly throughout the mental-practice material.
So perhaps the journey from score to performance is not simply:
notation → movement → sound
It may increasingly become:
notation → internal sound → inner singing → movement → physical sound
And with further development, these may cease to feel like separate steps at all.
A trainable transformation?
This leaves what I find to be the most interesting question.
The research demonstrates that musical notation can evoke auditory imagery and that expertise influences aspects of visual-to-auditory transfer.
But this does not by itself tell us how far the transformation can be deliberately developed.
- Can someone who initially sees notation largely as visual information learn to hear it internally?
- Can individual imagined pitches gradually become polyphony?
- Can pitch acquire imagined timbre, harmony, dynamics and voicing?
- Can covert singing become part of the bridge between written note and internally experienced musical movement?
- And can that increasingly detailed representation eventually participate in organising instrumental action?
These are not all questions that existing research has answered.
But they change the way we might think about reading music.
Perhaps expertise in score reading is not simply becoming faster at translating symbols into the correct keys.
Perhaps it is the gradual enrichment of what the notation becomes inside us before anything is played.
And that leaves a rather different question to ask the next time we open a score:
When I look at this note, what actually appears in my mind?