play by ear vs surmise

play by ear

verb
  • To do by guessing, intuition, or trial and error; to react to events as they occur; improvise 

  • To play guided by one's musical ear, rather than from a written score. 

surmise

verb
  • To imagine or suspect; to conjecture; to posit with contestable premises. 

noun
  • Thought, imagination, or conjecture, which may be based upon feeble or scanty evidence; suspicion; guess. 

  • Reflection; thought; posit. 

How often have the words play by ear and surmise occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )