Hearing Music inside your Head

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, one of the most important things a good composer must be able to is to be able to hear music in their mind’s ear. Of course, in order to listen to music in your head, you must listen to a lot of music in real life. I listen to a lot of music by Liszt, Beethoven and Nobuo Uematsu. This is a strange combination, but if you want to combine several different genres, that’s you’re right as a composer.

Anyway, as I was saying, you must listen to a lot of music in your preferred genre(s). I happen to be lucky in that I like classical piano music, most of which was composed more than a hundred years ago, so some recordings and MIDI files of such pieces are available to the public for free. You might not be so lucky, but that’s your problem if you don’t like classical music. I listen to this classical music most of the time, and whenever I have a spare moment in the day, if I’m not listening to or playing music, I’m thinking about it. This isn’t a conscious choice: I almost always have a tune stuck in my head. I don’t mind this, unless I’m trying to get to sleep. Usually, I do a lot of reading before going to bed, to focus my attention away from music. But that’s another topic entirely.

Composers are luckier than writers in this way, because if you look at books and articles on writing, they all say that, in order to be a writer, you must also be a reader. Luckily for us, it’s possible to just relax and listen to music passively: you don’t have to put fourth a lot of energy to hear music. On the other hand, reading does take a bit of mental energy and concentration (if you’ve ever read the gibberish I write in this blog before, you know what I mean.)

When listening to a piece of music, enjoy it. Don’t try to analyze the music, at least not yet. Listen the the piece over and over again until it’s stuck in your head.

However, don’t memorize every single individual note in the music. That would just be monotonous and probably not worth it in the end. Memorizing the melody of a musical piece you like is relatively easy, so that with that. Think of the emotions you associate with certain points in the melody. Think about the speed and general feel of the piece. The rest of the notes and chords should come to you when taking the time to play a musical piece in your head. If not, listen to it a few more times out lout before trying to play it in your head again.

If you want to play that musical piece by ear, no matter what instrument(s) the piece is meant for, refer back to the tune and the emotions you associated with it. With some focus, you may be able to take the tune and build on it with chords inside your head. Learn to mentally separate pieces in your head into the basic notes when playing them by ear. For example, if a song contains a C major chord, but you don’t know that, you can mentally slow down the musical piece and play each note in the chord separately, hearing in your head C, E and G.

This exercise may be difficult at first, but with practice, you will get better at it. When doing something that doesn`t require a lot of mental work, like doing chores around the house, play a tune in your head, even if you can only remember the melody line. If we want to compare this to weight training: playing a few notes in your head is like lifting a five pound weight. If you`re fairly weak, lifting this weight will give you a bit of a workout. However, once that`s easy for you, you can move on to lifting a ten pound weight (say, playing the complete melody line of a song in your head). At that point, you will still have the ability to lift a five pound weight. It’s just that lifting a five pound weight won`t give you as much of a work out any more. However, because lifting a five pound weight is easy, you can do it over and over again without getting tired. This built up strength will serve you on your way to lifting a three hundred pound weight (composing a perfected four-part fugue inside your head without having to write it down to remember it).

Obviously, learning to remember music and play it in your head is a helpful skill for any musician who wants to compose, improvise or transcribe music.