Glenn Gould's humming — thinking music away from the piano

Glenn Gould's humming — thinking music away from the piano

Glenn Gould hummed audibly on nearly every recording despite Columbia engineers' mic tricks. He traced it to practising under a vacuum cleaner's noise, which taught him to hear pieces internally and learn away from the instrument; the voice is the overflow, audible on the Goldberg Variations.

• Learning music away from the instrument builds a strong inner model • Recording artifacts can become part of an artist's signature

(no tools tagged) mental practice

Glenn Gould was one of the great pianists of the twentieth century, and he sang while he played. Not quietly. A wordless humming that followed whatever line his hands were on, and it is there on almost every record he made. Columbia’s engineers spent years trying to get rid of it. They pulled the microphones further from his face, changed the angles, tried putting a screen between him and the keyboard. Nothing worked. There was nowhere to put a microphone that could hear the piano but not the man bent over it. Gould never treated it as a fault. He said he was not so much playing the music as thinking it, and the voice was part of the thinking. He traced the habit back to his childhood, to an afternoon when the family vacuum cleaner was running while he practised. The noise swallowed the…