ABSTRACT
Having taught music theory and musicianship for over twenty-five years, I am convinced that many musicians image music in terms of the instruments they play. In giving melodic dictation, for example, I have seen a cellist raise her left hand and locate a problematic interval on an imaginary cello fingerboard in order to identify it. Guitarists are likely to associate heard chords with particular finger configurations on their instrument. Since in these situations an auditory stimulus is present, such behavior might not be considered in the strictest sense to involve musical imagery, which has been defined as 'our mental capacity for imagining musical sound in the absence of a directly audible sound source'.1 Nonetheless, the fact that students solving dictation problems frequently seek to gauge intervallic distance and other pitch information in motor-tactile terms is indicative of the multi-modal nature of musical imagery. Musical cognition in trained musicians entails not only auditory perception but also aspects of performance.2 Musical imagery thus derives from a complex web of auditory, visual, tactile, motor, and other experiences, from which no single type of stimulus or mode of perception can be easily extricated. For those of us who play an instrument, our training has a profound impact on the ways we both perceive and conceive musical structure.
