How to Hear the Music Before You Play It

When I first started teaching myself sight reading, I would look at the sheet and think about the rhythm. I'd put any old starting note in my head and try to hear what I was about to play, just based on note-go-up, note-go-down. But it wasn't right, ever. I didn't learn the real tune until my fingers made it happen.

This is how most of us start. But it puts you at a disadvantage. You're reacting to each note instead of anticipating it. You can't prepare for what's coming because you don't know what it's going to sound like.

Skilled sight readers do something different. They look at the page and hear the music -- or at least the general shape of it -- before they play. The technical term is audiation: hearing music in your mind when no sound is present. When you read words on a page, you hear them in your head without speaking. Reading music can work the same way.

Why It Helps

When you can hear what you're about to play before you play it, you're not just playing the dots. You're processing the music as music. You notice when something sounds wrong because it doesn't match what you expected. You can feel where the phrase is going. Your fingers can start moving toward the next position while you're still playing the current one. You can play musically from the get-go.

It's always easier to sight-read a tune you've heard before because you already know what it sounds like. Developing inner hearing gives you some of that advantage even with music you've never heard.

I wrote in my 12 things post that one of my goals has been "being able to sing/audiate what I read." That's still true. I still don't always anticipate the tune perfectly, but I'm right more often than I was to start, and it has made a noticeable difference in how sight reading feels. Less guessing, more intention.

What It Requires

To hear what you see, you have to know what notes sound like. Not just that this note is higher than that one, but how much higher. What's the sound-feeling of a 3rd versus a 5th versus an octave?

This is ear training. Intervals first -- learning to recognize the distance between two notes by ear. Then scale degrees -- learning to recognize where a note sits relative to the key.

Scale degrees matter because most sheet music isn't random intervals. It's music in a key. And once you know the key, every note has a character based on its relationship to the tonic. The 5 wants to resolve. The 7 pulls upward. The 3 is stable. These tendencies are part of what you hear when you audiate.

I've written about scale degrees in the context of transposing, but they're just as relevant here. If you see a note on the page and can immediately recognize it as the 5 of the key, you already know what it sounds like -- not because you memorized "this note sounds like this," but because you know what 5 sounds like in any key.

Practicing Away from the Piano

One thing I started doing a few years ago: sitting in my easy chair with a book of music and reading it without playing. Just looking at the notes and trying to hear them.

I would read through a hymn or a simple song, beat by beat, and try to audiate each note in order. When I got lost, I'd go back to the beginning of the phrase and start again. It was slow. It felt like I was doing nothing. But over time it got easier.

I also practiced tapping rhythm while audiating pitch. Hands on body, left and right together, while I tried to hear the melody in my head. The rhythm part was familiar because I'd done that for sight-reading practice. Adding the audiation made it harder, but it meant I was processing two dimensions of the music at once.

Practicing at the Piano

The chair practice helped with the hearing-what-I-see part. But I also needed to connect what I was hearing to my hands.

This is where melodic dictation practice came in. Hearing a melody and then identifying what scale degrees I heard. At first just recognizing them. Then finding them on the keyboard.

I built Tonic Sense because I wanted to practice exactly this: hearing a melody, recognizing the scale degrees, and playing them on the keyboard in whatever key I chose. The melodies are simple -- hymns and folk songs -- because the goal isn't technical challenge. The goal is building the connection between ear and hands.

The more I practiced hearing scale degrees and finding them on the keyboard, the more I started to recognize them when I saw them on the page. A leap from the tonic up to the 5 looked like something I knew the sound of. A descending line from 5 to 1 had a familiar feel before I played it.

Where I'm at Today

My inner hearing isn't always accurate, especially around the 4th and 5th scale degrees. I might think I'm hearing one thing and then play it and realize it was different. The connection isn't automatic. It requires attention.

But the practice has been worth it -- not just for sight reading, but for understanding the music I play. And I've broken myself of the bad habit of starting to play without looking at the key signature, because my desire to know how the song goes is important enough to figure it out before I start playing.

Where to Start

If you want to develop this skill, start with interval training. Learn to recognize seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths by ear. There are apps for this; I used several over the years.

Then move to scale degree recognition. This is harder. You have to establish a tonic in your ear and then recognize notes relative to it. Solfege or numbers -- either works. I use numbers sometimes (1, 2, 3...) but more often I use solfege (Do, Re, Mi...). The important thing is that you're hearing notes as positions in a key, not just as isolated pitches. I built my site so I could get good at this.

Then start trying to hear written music before you play. Start simple. Hymns, folk songs, easy pieces. Look at a phrase and see if you can hear it. Sing it out loud if that helps. Then play it and see if you were right.

It's slow going. But over time, the music on the page starts to have a sound.