Fostering Inner Hearing During Piano Playing

Inner hearing, as an important part of music psychology, has received great attention of many musicologists all the time. Recent years, this kind of ability has also gradually become the concerns of a lot of music educators and music learners. Inner hearing is a kind of mental activity combining old musical sound and new musical sound. Relative to the music actually heard, inner hearing usually won’t be influenced by real sound and affect the feeling of auditory organs. It is the imaginary sound in brain similar to a certain real sound. It is proved that human has a certain memory capacity. Usually people have different levels of inner hearing ability. After repeated listening of the imaginary music in brain, people will reinforce their ability of inner hearing. What’s more, inner hearing also plays an important role in improving the ability of music understanding, which is significant in musical performance and musical teaching. In piano playing, performers can foster perception of high quality sound. With sensitive musical hearing and high quality sound, piano performers can improve their ability of inner hearing and have a better understanding of musical works. Therefore, it is of great significance in practicing inner hearing during piano playing.This paper combines inner hearing and piano learning together and presents training approaches to inner hearing during piano learning. The development of inner hearing runs through the whole process of piano learning. The study emphasizes that the piano learner should think with mind, feel with heart and control with ear, then he will be able to express the emotion conveyed by the music more specifically and accurately. This article starts with the introduction of the concept and functions of inner hearing. After the introduction, it has two major parts. The first part analyzes different problems that piano performers may have when they try to reach the standard level of inner hearing in the process of piano leaning. The second part elaborates the training skills of inner hearing in three stages, from music exposure before piano learning to primary piano learning and then to high level piano learning. It discusses how to grasp the concept of inner hearing during the study in order to attract more music learners and educators to pay their attention to improving the ability of inner hearing in piano playing.