Notational audiation is the perception of the “mind’s voice”

Highly trained musicians not only play an instrument competently, but have been found to develop efficient skills related to music notation. For example, they can remember visually presented sequences of notes via musical imagery, and graphically represent in notation the pitches they imagine. Yet, the nature of this skill and encoding processes are not fully known, and while the experience seems to be one involving auditory processes of the inner ear (i.e., hearing in the “mind’s ear”), these mental representations may actually be much more reliant on subvocal kinesthetic motor memory (i.e., covert rehearsal of the “mind’s voice”). Aims In a previous study, Brodsky et al (2003) demonstrated that phonatory interference rather than rhythmic distraction or auditory input obstructs notational audiation. Accordingly, it was suggested that score reading involves kinesthetic-like phonatory processes. The current study attempted to further explore this notion. Method The current study employed Brodsky’s embedded melody paradigm, but with added concurrent surface Audio/EMG monitoring of the vocal folds