Mental Sound Image

As described in the article Learning and Practicing Modes, Mental Sound Image (MSI) is a center point of advanced piano interpretation. So to be a good pianist (or musician generally) you need to be able to work with MSIs and their associations as a way how to transform them into real playing.

First - what such an MSI is? It is not anything mysterious. Basically it is a kind of inner hearing of a fragment of music. More widely it is a knowledge of the fragment. This knowledge can have more levels of abstraction, but on the most basic level it is just a feel. It is an inner echo of the sequence. In this elementary form it has no time duration, it is just instant. On the more detailed level MSI knowledge has it's proper time proportions and can go to individual notes, chords structure, rhythm and so on, but for own playing just the elementary form is sufficient. The more detailed ones will be developed in hand with general advancement of your musicianship. For own playing the MSI is a means how to be mentally ahead of your hands. It is a way how to rule the hands and whole play, how to stay optimaly active and keep playing in control.

MSI is an entity that spontaneously emerges after long persistent practicing or making music actively (as we mentioned, professional musicians use them spontaneously and actively). As well the ability to read sheet music in the form of visual images and the ability to transform them into MSI is a collateral result of systematical musical training.

So the default path to gaining these abilities is to undergo this long demanding process of musical education. Or you can acknowledge these principles as relevant and start working on them targetedly to progress more effectively.

In the article Learning and Practicing Modes we mentioned four playing modes, two of them use MSI - one with the score (Advanced Read Mode - ARM), one from memory (Dialog with the Instrument - DIM). As concerns DIM, let's look at the process diagram again:

MSI (of a fragment) -association-> playing activity -> real sound -> inner comparison between the sound and the intention -association-> MSI of the next fragment

We described that you can reach DIM mode as a subsequent stage after ARM practicing. It means - first practice using ARM (what postulates some level of professionalism), then transform it into DIM practicing. But there is another possibility - direct DIM practicing approach. In such a case you need to practice using MSI directly. And for that a tool that communicates with you using real music sound, to make you realizing it and fixing it in your mind in a form of MSI is very handy. Piano Trainer application is such a tool.