EventsTalk · Members only
Musical Reasoning Without a Mind’s Ear
David Tolman, Los Angeles City College
Can you hear a song in your head?
In music education that’s called audiation: hearing music in your mind, with no sound playing, and working with it there. It has long been treated as central to being a musician.
So how do trained musicians with little or no inner hearing read, learn and rehearse music?
What the study found
David Tolman published the study as “Musical Reasoning without a Mind’s Ear: A Comparative Case Study” in the journal Auditory Perception & Cognition in 2026.
He interviewed three classically trained musicians, a pianist and two singers, each with at least eight years of formal training. All three rated their inner hearing at or near the bottom of the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, a questionnaire on how vividly you hear sounds in your mind. Little or no inner hearing is sometimes called auditory aphantasia, or anauralia.
Over two sessions, about 90 minutes in all, they talked him through tasks such as reading a score, sight-singing and rehearsing in silence.
Four strategies came up: the feel of music in the body, such as hand positions, breath and resonance; the look of the notes on the page; words and number codes; and working through music theory.
All three leaned on feel and on theory. The visual and verbal routes varied from person to person.
None of them knew, when they began training, that they lacked inner hearing.
The strategies had limits. One singer who relied on silent solfège, the do-re-mi syllables, reported occasional but persistent small pitch errors.
Another singer described strong visual imagery, a reminder that imagery in one sense can be missing while another is strong.
David concludes that, for the tasks he looked at, inner hearing isn’t needed for several kinds of musical reasoning, preparation and silent rehearsal.
These are three musicians who succeeded, describing their own methods, so the study can’t show how often missing inner hearing holds people back, or whether these routes work as well. He calls his account provisional.
What you’ll take away
- Four routes musicians use when they can’t hear music in their heads
- What “hear it in your head” asks of students who can’t
- Where the strategies fell short, and what still needs testing
About David
David Tolman carried out this study at Los Angeles City College. He studies how musicians with little or no inner hearing make sense of musical structure, and presented related work at the Mind’s Ear and Inner Voice conference in Auckland in 2025.