Issue 15: "Audiation"

Dearest reader,

I trust this letter finds you as it leaves me, in good health. Kiefer is an artist I’ve developed a huge amount of appreciation for in recent years. He’s an LA-based musician who, in addition to releasing great work, shares a lot of really valuable and easy-to-digest wisdom and guidance across the internet. He also has the unique and admirable habit of, on occasion, making himself available for real-time video calls with one or more participants from all across the globe for hour-long deep dives into topics of participants’ choosing.

I recently had the luck of attending a couple such calls—as part of a series he calls Piano Labs with Kiefer.1

This week I came across a video he shared, as part of the series, in which he introduces a concept I’d never heard of, and which is apparently amongst the most important skill to have as a musician: audiation.

Audiation is, to my current understanding, the ability for you to hear a sound in your head. This is not a skill unique to musicians. It’s something that’s common, a thing we all share. As an exercise, take a moment to clear your mind and try to remember a sentence spoken by a loved one, a friend—anyone close to you. Without even trying, you will likely be able to reproduce a huge amount of nuance and subtlety that makes the speaker’s voice uniquely theirs.

As I’m writing these lines, I’m imagining my grandmother saying “khalas” (Arabic slang for “finished”). Her tongue, which was not native to the Arabic language (she grew up in India and spoke Hindi), struggled to articulate the “kh” part of the word with ease. She would quickly rush through a short transient-like articulation of the beginning consonant and then expend the majority of her effort on bringing weight to the word’s latter section—the “alas”. Many years after being in her presence, I can hear her pronounce this word, all in my mind, with what feels like a shockingly high fidelity.

Since coming across Kiefer’s video, I’ve been practicing various ways of developing audiation musically.

A few days ago, while out for a long (slow) walk to a lake near my family’s house and back, I created and practiced an exercise that ended up occupying my spirit almost entirely. I selected a song I wanted to “hear better, in my head”. I began the exercise by trying to play the song back in my mind, producing a rendering as close to the original as possible. I put effort into keeping the tempo consistent, the key and form the same, moving as linearly as possible through the song, as though quite literally “playing it back” in the tapedeck of my mind.

It was shockingly hard. I quickly noticed that there were a few—like two, maybe three—aspects of the song that I had securely committed to memory. Everything else was fuzzy. I would jump between phrases of the verse, between sections of the song, and frequently lose track of my place, responding to this derailment with a restart. In fact, I mostly restarted at the beginning. It was as though the tapedeck of my brain was of faulty mechanics, and every 12 or 13 seconds looped back to the start of the reel.

After realizing how little of the song I had committed to memory, I took my phone out and listened to it—this time with a lot more focus and intention. I paid particular attention to the layers of the arrangement, how and when the vocal came in for the verse—and then paused the song and tried to see if my mind was able to render a more accurate version.

It was.

What I observed was that word by word, second by second, I was able to form a more accurate version of the song in my mind. I was able to establish a better imprint, a better rendering, of this track in question. It was a slow and burdensome process, but I am pleased to report that at the end of my walk, which lasted just under a couple hours, I was able to “replay” the introduction, verse, and pre-chorus a lot more accurately in my mind—which was a significant change compared to when I began the exercise.

That’s all I have for today. I hope you have a magical weekend, overflowing at the brim with delight and contentedness.

Love,
Reef