Login › Forums › Beyond Practicing Forum › How do you do mental hearing/listening? › Reply To: How do you do mental hearing/listening?
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Hi Elisha,
If I’m understanding things correctly, it sounds like what you’re describing might be related to the fact that we all have different levels of ability to visualize (or in this case “audiate”) sound.
As an analogy, imagine if I asked you to look at a bowl of fruit, then close your eyes, and then draw it from memory, exactly as it was. Not just the general locations of the fruit, but the color splotches on the apple, the dimples on the oranges, the spots on the bananas. A little trickier to get this level of detail, right? Then open your eyes again, look closer, and notice how much more carefully you are able to look and how much more detail you can then draw.
In much the same way, we can train ourselves to get better at having a more vivid sound in our head – but rather than beating your head up against a wall, you may need to “calibrate” the sound in your head by imagining a note or very short phrase, then playing that note or phrase on your instrument and rating from 1-10 how close the result was to what you heard in your head. Then imagine the note/phrase again, seeing if it can be closer to what you heard, then play again, and rate again. Over time, you can begin to select more nuanced or complex sounds/phrases, and hopefully you’ll find that as you practice this, and your number gets higher, your ability to hear something that very closely resembles your own sound will continue to improve.
Noa