Playing by ear - discovering by accident
The Joy of Surprise
I don’t play the piano to master it. I play it because sometimes it surprises me.
That sounds backwards, especially in a world obsessed with progress, scales, grades, and measurable improvement. But the thing that keeps pulling me back to the keys isn’t control - it’s discovery. It’s that moment when my fingers land somewhere they’ve never quite been before and something clicks. A sound appears that I didn’t plan, didn’t predict, and definitely didn’t know I knew.
Those moments feel accidental, but they’re not random in the way dice rolls are random. They’re more like wandering through a city you half-know. You turn a corner without thinking and suddenly there’s a street you’ve never noticed - familiar architecture, unfamiliar feeling. The piano works like that. My hands explore patterns, distances, shapes. Most of the time they revisit old neighbourhoods. Then, occasionally, they open a door I didn’t know was there.
Playing by Ear and Intuition
It’s not about finding “the right chord” or remembering some formal name. Often I don’t know what the chord is. I only know what it does - how it leans, how it resolves, how it feels slightly unstable in a way that makes me want to stay there a second longer. The theory can come later, or never. The joy is in the encounter.
If you asked me to describe my playing style, I’d call it ear-based or intuitive playing. I struggle with most traditional music theory, and trying to force it feels wrong. But I can tell immediately when something sounds right. I play by ear, but not just to reproduce what I hear - I explore, experiment, and discover new chords, phrases, and patterns as I go. My hands and ears guide me more than rules ever could.
What fascinates me is that these discoveries don’t feel like invention so much as recognition. As if the sound already existed and I just happened to bump into it. My conscious brain takes the credit, but really it’s my hands doing the thinking. They remember distances, tensions, shapes across the keyboard. They learn quietly, without asking permission.
The Zone - Flow and Inspiration
Sometimes, when everything clicks, I get this incredible buzz - that feeling of being completely in the zone. I’m totally in tune with myself, and somehow, with the universe. It feels like I could play anything, like suddenly everything makes perfect sense. Every chord, every melody, every rhythm lines up and flows effortlessly.
At the same time, my head fills with inspiration, as if the melodies and chords are being fed to me. It’s an extremely relaxed but exhilarating feeling. I chase it, and it doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, I know it instantly. Just a few minutes in this zone feels like I’ve accomplished what would normally take hours, or even days, in other areas of life. The time invested in these moments feels tremendously amplified - every idea, every pattern, every discovery counts for so much more than normal. In these moments, music isn’t just something I play - it’s something I live, breathe, and discover all at once.
Sound Design and Pattern Exploration
Over time, I’ve realised this is exactly the same reason I love creating music more broadly, especially sound design.
Digging through vast libraries of patches, stumbling across a sound I didn’t expect, or building one from scratch and watching it slowly turn into something interesting - it scratches the same itch as finding a new chord by accident. A filter tweak, an envelope change, one parameter nudged slightly too far, and suddenly the sound speaks differently. I didn’t plan it. I found it.
The same goes for patterns. I love creating something simple and then deliberately destabilising it - shifting certain notes, randomising note positions, letting small changes ripple through the whole idea. Patterns emerge that I would never have come up with consciously. It feels less like composition and more like exploration, as if I’m uncovering possibilities rather than authoring them.
Software, Hardware, and Tactile Music
That’s why I enjoy music production software so much, as well as hardware. Software lets me layer synths, stack plugins, route things in slightly odd ways and see what happens. It’s a playground for controlled chaos. Hardware brings the physicality back in - the tactile pleasure of twisting knobs, pushing sliders, feeling resistance under your fingers as the sound mutates in real time. It’s hands-on thinking. The same curiosity that guides my fingers across piano keys shows up when I’m leaning over a synth workstation.
The Endless Landscape
In all of this, I’m not chasing mastery or completeness. I know I’ll never discover every possible chord, sound, or pattern, and that’s part of the appeal. Music isn’t a finite puzzle to be solved; it’s a landscape you can walk for a lifetime and still find new paths.
Sometimes I sit down and nothing new happens. That’s fine. Other times, a strange voicing appears, or a sound suddenly blooms into something unexpected, and I just stop and listen, slightly stunned.
I don’t play to eliminate mystery. I play to keep it alive.