An increasing body of research has explored the importance of deliberate practice (Chaffin, 2003) and effective learning strategies to build instrumental performance by heart (Hallam, 1997). Few studies, however, have addressed the way that music itself (style, structure) and the cognitive profile of the musician determine performance and retrieval cues. Performers gradually build a multilayered mental representation of music: eminently multimodal at the cognitive level, visual, motor, auditory, perceptive, emotions (etc.) mental representations constitute the different components or layers of inner audition. We consider that inner audition results from the psychological individuality of the performer and the particular features of repertoire. As a first approach, in this exploratory qualitative study, we investigated the associative nature of inner representations of different types of music, while collecting some elements of the cognitive profile. We studied the memorisation strategies and retrieval structures adopted by expert pianists according to a sample of works involving different hierarchies types of cognitive skills. Our results suggest that inner representation of music is a result of a multimodal and multilayered information processing. The cognitive strategies adopted by the pianist to memorise depended on the musical writing but were also determined by the cognitive profile. A deeper assessment of the individual differences will be tested to further examine associations between creativity, information processing, empathy and personality. This preliminary work supports the interest of approaching cognitive psychology from a musicology perspective and suggests further directions.