‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’
This is possibly Edwin Gordon’s sharpest definition of the term audiation or better in its active form, what it means to audiate.
Audiation is the central concept in Gordon’s music learning theory and his notion of musical aptitude. For Gordon there are types and stages of audiation and the means of constructing sequences of learning. His book ‘Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Content, and Patterns – A Music Learning Theory (1997) provides a comprehensive account of his theory.
In England, at least, audiation is not a term in common use. It is not at the forefront of many music teacher’s minds or a part of their pedagogic decision making. The recent Ofsted research review has one passing audiation reference.
Yet, notions like the inner ear, aural imagery, sub-vocalising, internalising and the mind’s ear are familiar enough terms in use seeking to describe and capture something thought to be fundamental to the growing musical mind and the capacity to make music well.
The term audiation is able to easily embrace such terms while transcending their folkiness into a powerful explanatory unity.
‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’
Gordon sometimes writes about the mind’s music.
The mind is a place of thinking and feeling, a place for thinking and feeling music.
Gordon makes an important clarification. Audiation is not aural perception. Aural perception deals with the immediacy of sound events. Audiation brings to those events what has been heard and comprehended in the past through memory and predicts what might be heard in the future. Gordon uses the parallel of hearing and comprehending speech.
Audiation is in play whether we are engaged as a listener, performer, improviser, composer or music reader.
Gordon’s audiation types include notational audiation – the capacity to hear and comprehend the sounds represented by notation in their absence, a capacity thought to make a pupil’s work musical rather than mechanical.
Then there is creative audiation – the capacity to work on and transform both existing and new musical material.
The reader will be able to imagine many ways of deploying audiation as a pedagogic tool and reflect on the ways they already encourage their pupils to think and feel in sound.
Perhaps the first step is to ensure our pupils understand that they are audiating beings.
Music Education Now 