The mental representation of music notation: Notational audiation.

Abstract

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally "hear" the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the previously developed embedded melody task and further explores the phonatory nature of notational audiation with throat-audio and larynx-electromyography measurement. Experiment 1 corroborates previous findings and confirms that notational audiation is a process engaging kinesthetic-like covert excitation of the vocal folds linked to phonatory resources. Experiment 2 explores whether covert rehearsal with the mind's voice also involves actual motor processing systems and suggests that the mental representation of music notation cues manual motor imagery. Experiment 3 verifies findings of both Experiments 1 and 2 with a sample of professional drummers. The study points to the profound reliance on phonatory and manual motor processing-a dual-route stratagem-used during music reading. Further implications concern the integration of auditory and motor imagery in the brain and cross-modal encoding of a unisensory input.

Musicians’ memory for verbal and tonal materials under conditions of irrelevant sound

“…Previous authors have noted that ability to perform notation audiation varies widely in musicians (Brodsky et al, 2003(Brodsky et al, , 2008. Evidence from the present experiment supports this suggestion.…”

Visuo-motor imagery of specific manual actions: A multi-variate pattern analysis fMRI study

“…For example, Mackay (1981) demonstrated that sentence production improves not only when producing these out loud but also silently. Beneficial effects of imagery have also been observed in typing (Wohldmann et al, 2007), music (Brodsky et al, 2008), dance (Golomer et al, 2008) and surgery (Hall, 2002). Analogous mechanisms may be involved when learning from observation, i.e.…”

Auditory–motor learning influences auditory memory for music

“…Musicians may engage motor and auditory processes when reading musical notation (Brodsky, Kessler, Rubinstein, Ginsborg, & Henik, 2008), as they did in the auditory imagery task reported here. Despite this possibility, a distinction between the motor and auditory imagery tasks is supported by the fact that scores on the two measures did not correlate with one another, and they correlated differentially with recognition following the different learning conditions.…”