Sight-Reading

Sight reading is usually taught as a decoding skill: see the note, find the key, play it. Practice enough and you get faster at the decoding.

But skilled sight readers are doing something different. They're not just decoding—they're hearing the music before they play it. They look at a phrase and know what it's going to sound like. The technical term is audiation: hearing music in your mind when no sound is present.

This makes sight reading feel completely different. Instead of reacting to each note as it comes, you're anticipating. You notice when something sounds wrong because it doesn't match what you expected. You can prepare your hand for the next position while still playing the current phrase.

Why Inner Hearing Helps

Think about reading text out loud. You don't decode one letter at a time—you see a word or phrase and know how it sounds before you speak it. Reading music can work the same way, once you've developed the ear for it.

It's always easier to sight-read something you've heard before. You already know what it sounds like, so you're just matching your playing to a sound you know. Developing inner hearing gives you some of that advantage even with music you've never seen.

I wrote more about this in How to Hear the Music Before You Play It.

What Inner Hearing Requires

To hear what you see, you have to know what the notes sound like. Not just "this note is higher"—but how much higher, and what that specific interval feels like.

This means ear training. Interval recognition first—knowing the sound of a third versus a fifth versus an octave. Then scale degree recognition—hearing a note as "the 5" or "the 3" based on its position in the key.

Scale degrees matter because most music isn't random intervals. It's music in a key. Once you know the key, every note has a predictable character based on its relationship to the tonic. The 5 wants to go somewhere. The 7 pulls upward. The 3 is stable. When you see these on the page and recognize them, you already know their sound.

How Melodic Dictation Helps Sight Reading

Melodic dictation is ear training in the other direction: you hear a melody and identify the notes. But the skill transfers directly to sight reading.

When you've spent time hearing scale degrees and recognizing them, you start to recognize them when you see them too. A leap from the tonic up to the 5 looks like something you know the sound of. A descending line from 5 down to 1 has a familiar feel before you play it.

The more I practiced melodic dictation, the more I found myself audiating when I looked at sheet music. The connection isn't instant—it takes time—but it's real.

Where to Start

If you want to develop inner hearing for sight reading:

First, make sure you can identify intervals by ear. There are many apps for this.

Then, work on scale degree recognition through melodic dictation. This is the part that connects to sight reading—hearing notes as positions in a key.

Then, practice looking at sheet music and trying to hear it before you play. Start simple. Hymns, folk songs, easy pieces. See if you can audiate a phrase, then play it and check if you were right.

Tonic Sense is the tool I built to practice the melodic dictation piece. Hundreds of simple melodies, organized by difficulty, with practice in solfege, scale degrees, or piano keyboard. The melodies are simple on purpose—the goal is building ear skills, not technical challenge.