Recent critical advances in the field of Word and Music Studies have drawn attention to the role of the reader in the process of “activating” the “Musical Novel”. The scorelike qualities of Finnegans Wake are not designed for mere sight-reading, and instead require a literary equivalent of what is referred to as “audiation” in musicology. I suggest here that the Wake demands to be read in a fashion analogous to the way a musician audiates a polyphonic musical score. Performing the Wake’s musical score fragment “silently” within our mind, is a gateway to the manner in which we might read the entirety of the book. This practice can be called “literary audiation”, and it paves an exciting avenue to approach Joyce’s complex text. Here we come at odds with Joyce’s own claim that to understand his texts, we should read them aloud. In fact, reading them aloud requires a sequence of choices, closing down the democratic and multifaceted aspect of Joyce’s texts. Alternatively, the silent world of “inner hearing” does not demand such choices and so is, in fact, the ideal site for the performance of these words. This sort of audiated reading should not be restricted to overtly musical sections; it is a way of experiencing the text in general.