This is the first post in a series on mental practice at the piano. This series will explore the idea of mental practice and how it can help you be a better musician and pianist. 

What is Mental Practice?

Imagine you are an actor, and you have a lot of lines to learn for an upcoming play.  But the catch is, you can only practice when everyone else is there, too. You are not allowed to take the script home or rehearse your lines on your own. The only time you can spend learning your lines is when you are in full costume and all the other actors are also on stage with you, including the director and the stage crew. 

You wouldn’t get very far. You would be frustrated that you were forbidden from studying the script on your own. It would seem extremely inefficient and like a big waste of everyone’s time as they wait around while you get familiar with your lines.

Needless to say, this is not how actors approach their scripts. They study them. They mentally rehearse them. They practice their lines a LOT: at home, while they’re driving, while they’re standing in line at the grocery store, and they have practice run-throughs in their head. They do all the mental work in order to be fully prepared by the time they are on stage rehearsing with other people. 

This is mental practice.

You already do mental practice in other parts of your life. When you study for a test, you might sit quietly at a desk and go over your notes and texts. Sometimes you might say something out loud or re-organize your thoughts, writing down bullet points or phrases to clarify things for yourself. If somebody were watching you quietly study or read, it wouldn’t look like much was going on. But inside your brain, lots of associations are being made and there is a lot of repetition and review of test material.  

When you read, you don’t have to recite the text out loud in order to comprehend the material. The brain has the ability to read printed words on the page and imagine those words in your head. 

Music is the same – the brain is able to imagine music without hearing it out loud in the room. Mental practice involves practicing your music in your head rather than physically producing it.

Examples of mental practice:

What mental practice is NOT:

Who can benefit from mental practice?

Absolutely anyone can benefit from mental practice! You can do mental practice at the very early stages of learning a piece, right up until the moment before you step out on stage. You can be an absolute beginner or the most advanced player, and mental practice will help you refine and improve your performance.

How mental practice helps you be a better musician

Inner hearing: what it is and what it feels like 

Effective mental practice relies on the ability to hear music in your head, sometimes called “inner hearing.” Like many skills at the piano (or any instrument), you can strengthen your inner hearing with consistent practice.

Have you ever had a song fragment or jingle from a commercial floating through your head for several days and you just couldn’t get rid of it? This is inner hearing at work.

With mental practice, you can learn to redirect this kind of involuntary inner hearing into something that is conscious and targeted.

It is possible to develop the ability to hear a piece of music you are working on so vividly in your head that you can discern every detail of the performance with great intensity, almost as if it is happening in the room or you are producing the sound yourself.

Inner hearing feels similar to reading words – when you read a book, a voice is “saying” the words inside your head but no sound is occurring in the room.

One important difference between inner hearing and reading words is that we tend to read in our head at a faster rate than the words are spoken, whereas inner hearing happens at the rate that the piece would be played out loud. Mental practice tends to happen in real time.

Mental practice vs. score study vs. inner hearing vs. audiation 

In conclusion

Mental practice is the practice of mentally rehearsing your music when you are away from the instrument. You can do it literally anywhere: when you are waiting for a bus or train, when you are standing in line, when you have a few minutes between other activities. 

Mental practice happens inside your head, but it’s a very active process. It is a practice technique you can – and should – use at any stage of the learning process.

Sometimes students feel intimidated by the idea of mental practice, because it’s so…well… quiet. And therefore it’s hard to know if you’re doing it right. My next post will explore some of the reasons people don’t do mental practice and how to push past that resistance.

But for now, here’s an exercise to try, designed to strengthen your inner hearing.

Exercise:

  1. Sit at the piano (or your instrument) and play middle C.
  2. Sing the note you just played.
  3. Now, imagine it in your head, at the same pitch as the note you just sang.
  4. Sing the C you just imagined, and then sing a D. Check the pitch at the piano if you need to.
  5. Then, mentally sing those two notes in a row.
  6. Continue this, using different intervals from the starting pitch, always starting from middle C (e.g., C-E, C-F, C-G). Sing the interval, check if you need to, and then “sing” it again in your head.

You only need to do this exercise for five minutes or so. If you repeat it every day, starting on different pitches and exploring different intervals, you will start to notice that the imaginary singing you do in your head becomes more vivid.

A couple of final tips:

If you find it difficult to “hear” the music in your head, at first you can rely more on playing at the instrument and singing what you hear.

Before you “check” the interval by playing, try to imagine it in your head first. Keep trying to visualize it in your head, and your inner hearing skills will improve over time.

If you find it very easy to do this exercise, make it more complex by playing longer strings of notes at a time or chords, and practice hearing every note in the texture.

What experiences have you had with mental practice? What strategies do you use to improve your ability to hear music in your head? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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4 Responses

  1. Hello, I began this thought of mentally studying piano pieces just last evening after reading the book published by Emile Pandolfi, a pianist. I have just read you articled and just realized I could listen to a song as I sang it! I used to sing a good bit and the music I hear in my brain is clear as a bell. I am not sure I can look at a piece of music and play it in my brain because I am new at piano, only 7 months teaching myself. I am 88 years old but determined to be a fair pianist. Question, how do I master the true sounds on pitch of music notes, in a piece, I have never heard? I can hear clearly in my brain, The Lords Prayer, and many other songs I have song and sing this day!
    Looking forward to your response. thank you for your comments.

    1. Hi! Thanks for sharing your journey! Mental practice is possible, but much more challenging, to do with pieces you’ve never heard. Since you are new to the piano, I suggest baby steps: you can use mental practice to help you in the learning process alongside your physical practice at the keyboard. For starters, you could listen to a few recordings of the piece in order to get familiar with it as you learn it at the piano. You could also alternate between playing a fragment from your new piece on the keys a few times, and then immediately after that, try to recall what you just played in your head. These exercises can strengthen your mental imaging at the piano, and over time make it easier to hear the sounds and pitches accurately in your head. Hope this helps!

  2. Hi,
    So I’ve been playing piano for a year probably at a in between beginner and intermediate level. I’ve noticed if I think of a song I can imagine it as a piano song and sometimes either imagine it with some diminished chords giving it a jazzy type feel or long strings of appregios. The interesting thing is im unable to physically play what I imagine. What I’m imagining is beautiful and complex. Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how I could maybe learn to turn the thought of a song into reality?
    Thanks,
    Y.Z

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