🎹 Do We Really Hear What We Play?

One of the most difficult — and most essential — skills for a pianist is learning to listen honestly to oneself.

We often believe we’re hearing what we play.

But in reality, we may only be hearing what we meant to play.

Our imagination fills in the gap — and the difference between intention and reality disappears.

This is human. But it’s also dangerous.

Because when we stop listening, we stop improving — and we stop discovering.

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The Feedback Loop of Awareness

To play consciously, a pianist must engage several feedback processes at once:

1. Imagination — forming the inner sound

2. Execution — the physical act of playing

3. Perception — hearing the sound that actually happens

4. Evaluation — comparing what we hear to what we intended

5. Adjustment — actively shaping the next gesture in real time to close the gap between intention and result

That last step is important.

Adjustment doesn’t mean reflecting after the performance.

It means responding while playing — phrase by phrase, note by note, moment by moment.

To do that, we must exist in three time zones at once:

• The future (what we want)

• The present (what we’re doing)

• The past (what we just heard)

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Listening Is a Learned Skill

As Arnold Schultz discusses in A Theory of Consciousness, our senses, including hearing, are not innate but developed through experience.

This means that:

Listening is not automatic.

It’s not passive.

It is an active skill that must be trained — just like technique.

Without it, we play in a closed loop: intention → motion → imagination → confirmation.

With it, we open the door to something far more dynamic:

A playing that listens.

A touch that responds.

A technique that thinks.

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JM | Art of Piano

Jean Muller