How do you perceive music?

combination of a couple at least

Some of those more often than others.

Yeah sometimes in combination stevo

I see a montage of scenes from my childhood in Sunflower Orphanage, occasionally me and my mates performing the song in funny outfits

i see noodle vague and his mates performing in funny outfits

Should've been a poll option

I'm synaesthesic, but not with music, and also towards the aphantasic side. I'll have to ponder this one!

With a lot of dance records I literally picture a dance floor. Or sometimes I picture a car on the street playing that song through a good sound system. But if I were actually hearing the music from a car on the street I guess I would picture something else, probably the singer performing. But with other types of music it would probably be one of the other choices on the list, it would depend on how evocative and relatable the song is.

I have aphantasia, cannot make any imagery with my mind unless on the edge of sleep, or I'm a fever or on certain drugs. what music does for me is take me to a specific place/time, like one that comes up a lot is (a) the end of Fen Causeway in Cambridge then (b) a similar-feeling road in Prague then (c) the time I went there with a Canadian friend and her friend from home, then (d) the fact that her friend died suddenly from a brain tumor a year later. Another place that often comes up is the old laundry room at Whitbourne Hall, where I (partially) grew up. Not sure if any of this will mean anything to anyone, sorry, but it's not really like I see these places, it's like I have a sense of the psychogeography of them and the emotions and memories that fit, and most of the time the association is opaque and I have no idea why this music = this place, except that maybe last time I listened to it I was thinking of it, and it's accidentally become linked. So think that goes under "other"

As I say, the poll options are drawn from a book that I only have a certain amount of time for (although they are based in research carried out by the author who is a psychologist and former music producer).

So I don't really know if they're useful or unhelpfully categorising people in boxes that in themselves make a bunch of assumptions.

I definitely would be ticking a few or all of these boxes really. Or maybe it's none of these.

If I listen to "Under BOAC" by Autechre, I picture being inside a gigantic clockwork machine, like a grandfather clock as tall as the Eiffel Tower, with enormous springs being wrenched and pulled.

Broken Social Scene's "Hotel" gives me an almost somatosensory feeling of a hot shower after having been out in the cold for a long time.

Kraftwerk's "The Model" doesn't make me think of a model or robots or Kraftwerk themselves, but streetlights distorted through a car window in a rainy day.

Whether this is all cross-sensory or associative or just something entirely made up, I can't tell you.

Synaesthesiacs who say they "see" colours when they think of numbers make me wonder if this stems from maybe a child's picture book or frieze they might have learnt from when they were young.

But I think it's just as interesting that someone might be able to hear music without scenes or images coming to them

CaAL - that's interesting. I think one of the poll options (autobiographical memories) would definitely work there

I generally sing along, with the lyrics if they exist or with the bass line

somewhere between picturing musicians performing and picturing myself performing. The way I'd describe it is that I'm always envisioning how the piece was made and how I might re-create it or something like it.

Primarily, "A story unfolds in my mind," but also a blend of the following:

I picture the musician(s) performing the song or musical piece onstage, in the studio, or in a video: Less common, but who's not gonna picture Slash outside the church when listening to November Rain?
I imagine myself performing the song or piece of music: If I identify with a song strongly enough, I will imagine "what if I wrote this and performed it at a local open mic night and everybody clapped?"
I see patterns, colours, shapes that don't represent anything specific: Instrumental music, mostly, like techno or classical or Dead jams. Sometimes that stuff will trigger a story to unfold in my mind as well, though.

xp Moodles, even if it's, say techno, which I know you enjoy a lot - do you think in quite literal terms of "I wonder how this was made / I would like to make this"?

I didn't pick "autobiographical memories" because the associations are so random and unconnected to the music itself, and are not so much about memories of events but of the feeling of particular places - but even more so because most music does not produce images at all. I'm also severely colour blind and visuals are just much less important to me than sounds, I can play whole albums in my head and not see anything.

If I say a piece of music sounds like a jetski skimming over a purple and orange ocean, that's literally how I perceive it - I see that very clearly in my mind, and that's how I thought everybody thought of music - like a sensory generator that produces fantastical sensations - mostly visual but possibly olfactory or haptic.

this just sounds like a sort of synthesia? idk i don't experience synthesia and my imagination is much more oriented towards audio over visuals, i don't particularly associate music with imagery - it can bring up associations of course but that's hardly the default

I voted "something else." I *can* visualize various things while listening to music, but that is like a secondary, optional thing. The way I experience music is simply through the way it makes me feel, and any images or stories I might employ are metaphors to communicate that feeling to someone else. That's the long and the short of it for instrumental music.

When vocals and lyrics are involved it's a bit different. If I hear a human voice, I'm naturally going to picture the person behind that voice, either what they actually look like, or what I imagine they must look like. And I'll visualize whatever story or image the singer is putting forth, so far as I can.

One thing that I have found is that the more I have learned about music over the years, the more involved my analytic mind is while listening--noticing aspects of composition, playing technique, arrangement, production, etc. It's an automatic thing that I can't really turn off, so it's just as much a part of my perception (and enjoyment!) as the immediate emotional impact. When I talk to friends who also love music but who have not played or studied it, I get the impression that they experience music more as a total gestalt, rather than as separate elements.

xp I can't speak to Moodles' experience, but "how was this created" is a question that often occurs to me while listening

I clicked "patterns, colours, shapes," but really it's a combination of that and picturing scenery. The other day I was at a show with my brother and at the end of a lovely instrumental guitar piece I turned to him and said "That made me want to visit Isle au Haut, Maine!" but then couldn't give any reason why other than "well, when I was listening to it I pictured Isle au Haut, Maine." But mostly I just get an image like a screensaver of little bursts of shape or color appearing in the part of my field of vision that corresponds to where the sound is coming from. Often they are very undefined - it's more that I know something is there and I feel like I'm seeing something, rather than actually visualizing a full shape that I could draw.

But sometimes I do get images like your jetski - it really depends on the music. This summer I posted about listening to Wrong Way Up by John Cale and Brian Eno on a train, and how that seems appropriate because I picture a song like "Lay My Love" as a train - not the kind of high-speed train I was on, but the classic image of a steam train with wheels clacking busily underneath it and then the train itself gliding along smoothly on top of all that frenetic motion.

I think of music as a giant llama.

Like, how giant? Mountain-sized or like the size of a lifted pickup truck?

a little bit of each of these, depending on the music I guess

I was literally just thinking about how, 10 years ago on this board, I was so sure everyone was "taken somewhere" in their mind when they listened to music as I did that I asked something like "so where do you go when you listen to this?" and got some answers challenging the premise. Basically people saying that's nice your brain does that but that's certainly not universal and for a lot of people it's just enjoying the sounds / melodies without any sort of mental transportation.

So I was thinking about how at this point in my life, possibly also due to some medications, is my "transportive" experience with music still even a thing? It was so inherent to my experience at the time but now it's kind of circumstantial if it happens at all. I used to curate music very specific to settings because of the way it would soundtrack very specific mind journeys, but these days it matters way less to me and I think by and large I'm NOT visualizing thematically appropriate locations during listening and yet I'm still capable of it.

However, reflecting on how intense it used to be for me makes me wonder if my mental health has tanked to a certain degree or if it's just simply an evolution in my focuses or priorities or neurons or what.

So I was thinking about how at this point in my life, possibly also due to some medications, is my "transportive" experience with music still even a thing? It was so inherent to my experience at the time but now it's kind of circumstantial if it happens at all. I used to curate music very specific to settings because of the way it would soundtrack very specific mind journeys, but these days it matters way less to me and I think by and large I'm NOT visualizing thematically appropriate locations during listening and yet I'm still capable of it.

How people curate their playlists is an interesting one.

I have a friend who is a huge huge encylopedic font of music knowledge, and, like me, a big fan of putting together themed playlists.
Unlike me though, he describes himself as largely aphantasic. His playlists tend to focus on specific micro-genres or periods and places in time.
So for example he has playlists called things like "New York House & Garage: 2000s" or "West Midlands Ska & Reggae 1979-81".
These are EXPERTLY curated, really cleverly put-together playlists by someone who clearly has a passion for deep dives into history, scenes and micro-movements.

Compare this to the kinds of playlists I tend to put together and which broadly ignore conventions of time, place, physical context. Rather they tend to focus on moods that are very specific to myself.
Using a naming convention of "short words beginning with 'S'", one example is "SMOG" which attempts to capture the feel of a smoky underground hotel lounge at some strange hour of the night.
On there, there is everything from The Viscounts' "Harlem Nocturne" to Two Lone Swordsmen's "Brother Foster Through The Phones" to dEUS's "Quatre Mains" to Eric Dolphy's "Hat And Beard" - none of them related other than they all give off a particular atmosphere.
Other playlists include STARE (oppressive, uncanny alien worlds), and STORM (pop songs that make me feel like I'm safe indoors while gales and rain lash down outside - "Running Up That Hill", for example).

Just two ways to approach things, I guess, but I couldn't do the smartly-researched thing my friend does. It's very much about feel and texture.

I think I picture the musicians and instruments for some kinds of music, especially if I'm familiar with them, like jazz or James Brown or whatever. But I also have a lot of abstract images of color and shape related to the timbers and rhythms, and for electronic music that's all there is.

Although unfortunately I do picture a DAW and plugin chains/automation for some kinds of music, usually only mediocre computer-made music though. If it's working it rises above that or I can't picture how they made it.

I don't like to focus on the abstract images side too closely, I guess, although I think it's probably very important to my sense of balancing things or making adjustments when I'm performing or making music.

And even though I'm not a big colors person (r/g colorblind), I have very clear color associations for different instrument textures.

The word "texture" as you've used it DL has sort of unlocked something for me, which is that my perception of music overlaps much more with my sense of *touch* than with anything visual. The timbre of an instrument can feel to me like a scratchy sweater, and a chord progression like a cool breeze on my face. This is still sort of metaphorical, but it's much more immediate and visceral and doesn't involve imagining much of anything visual

A long time ago I dated someone who responded to music even more acutely in this way. I played some Fennesz for her and she had to ask me to turn it off because it was provoking such an intense somatic reaction

Something else.

From a fairly early age, I began to understand that certain neural pleasure centres were stimulated by certain harmonic and melodic movements. Vaguely, it was moments of transcendent dissonance and resolution-- the entire first page of Chopin's A-flat ("Heroic") Polonaise kinda zips by in most performances, but if you slow it down, and play through it carefully, you realise that it's this protracted adventure over a V-root that goes to some extremely dissonant places before finally resolving on the exposition of the main theme. Tchaikovsky's "Andante Cantabile" (here) from Quartet #1 (the piece that famously made Tolstoy cry) has some of the loveliest SATB Bach-style writing, with this more-modern (almost poppy) middle section in a ridiculously distant unrelated key-- bIII, one of my first encounters with a mediant-related modulation. When I was younger I was drawn to more brutal Russian parallel movements and angular stuff, Prokofiev Violin Concerto 1 and Shostakovich Symphony 10 being the most conspicuous survivors from my childhood taste-- I no longer feel the same pull toward, say, Mussorgsky's Pictures. Conversely, toward middle-age my "like" of Schubert turned into a "passionate adoration".

These particular moments of neural stimulation would go on to form a sort of dogma about musical decisions. I remember, in my early 20s, playing in bands, struggling to express to my bandmates why my ears preferred it "this way" over "that way". I was told that another local musician had a similar tendency toward "dogmatic, seemingly arbitrary decision-making", and that in this dude's case he refused to play a V7, that the sound of the lowered 7th just grated against his ears. (I don't mind V7s but I would also vote against them in most circumstances, so I was happy to hear that I wasn't alone in these strange dogmas).

Similarly, certain harmonic decisions would fill my brain with the reverse, with a feeling of ennui and dissatisfaction. The most conspicuous of these is a I-ii-I movement. I love drones and songs that just hammer a I-chord for their duration, but for some reason, a I-ii-I always made my brain feel "really bad", which put me in a position of prejudice against certain popular songs that contained that movement. Certain of those songs (Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne") I've come to love despite that movement, and others (Parton/Rogers "Islands In The Stream") I still cannot bring myself to even tolerate and will slip out of karaoke for a breath of fresh air when somebody elects to sing it.

There are many composers and songwriters whose harmonic decisions trigger my pleasure centres and I afford them a greater-than-perhaps-deserved amount of my time and appreciation-- my big 4 canon composers are Bach, Chopin, Bartok and Ives and I think it literally is because these composers tend to make "the decisions" that my brain wants to hear. Other composers who are widely adores don't make those same decisions-- or perhaps make those decisions for people whose brains are wired differently-- and I cannot really enjoy Beethoven, Bruckner, much of Brahms and much of Tchaikovsky.

The fact that so much of my music appreciation comes down to "the nuts and bolts of harmony" has acted as a retardant toward many genres-- I've been slow to appreciate funky bass lines, over-complicated jazz progressions, bridge-pickup rhythm guitar parts, drum solos. I'd describe my preferences as "stiff"-- one of my favouritest things is when a choir introduces a meaty descant part on the final verse of a Christmas carol, and one of my least-favouritest things is when the final chorus of a pop song features the lead doing vocal improvs and comping. I mean, at this point in my life, I like it all, but I remember quite acutely my first exposure to (for example) Mariah Carey's "Fantasy" being one of confusion, it sounded cacophonous and formless to my 15-year old ears, but within a few years my feelings had reversed entirely and I concur that it's a proper choice for "the best song of the decade".

There are pockets in the pop music canon that I don't fully "get", still, I guess. I feel like Garth Hudson must've made the suggestions (or planted the seeds) that made The Band elect to have the chorus of "Dixie Down" be I/V - IV - I/V - IV (instead of slipping to the root note of the I, I mean, maybe it was Danko's decision but it was a brilliant decision), and add that achingly beautiful suspension in the "na na na" chorus. That said, I don't really get The Band, I don't get most of "The Last Waltz", there's something odd about that whole era of late 70s rock (in particular, Joni's performance of "Coyote") that just doesn't trigger my pleasure centres. I don't get sax solos in that context. I re-watched "The Last Waltz" last night and I just wanted to turn it off and listen to Marquee Moon instead.

If I say a piece of music sounds like a jetski skimming over a purple and orange ocean, that's literally how I perceive it - I see that very clearly in my mind, and that's how I thought everybody thought of music - like a sensory generator that produces fantastical sensations - mostly visual but possibly olfactory or haptic.

For me this kind of imagery only emerges when I'm intelectually trying to pinpoint how I feel about a song or communicating this to others - the metaphors aren't dishonest, but they do not appear organically while listening, it's a kind of translation.

dog latin I think you'd probably love exploring the lovingly assembled comps on dreamweapons.net

I'll check it out, thanks Evan

I know very little about the kind of music theory you mention fgti. but I think I know what you mean about "Islands In The Stream" - it's nothing to do with the song itself or the people singing it or anything like that; because now you mention it, it's the chord progression that makes me itch. I don't hate it so much as I'd leave the room but there's a reason I find it somehow dissatisfying and distracting

I'd like to know how you feel about, say Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman"

It's funny, I don't have the ear to be able to identify what I do or don't like harmonically in detail as I'm listening (would have to go to the keyboard and put in some serious effort), but fgti's post reminds me that when I was a kid I hated when a song would have a cool one-chord or minor key verse, and then go into a major key chorus, it sounded sappy to me. And I couldn't stand thick Beach Boys-style harmonies, which I love now. But I would listen to the Beethoven's 5th opening over and over. And I still get off on rhythm and interlocking parts much more than harmony, even though I love a good chord progression now and should spend more time analyzing what I like.

I don't have aphantasia, but I do have kind of limited phantasia - so if I'm "seeing something" in my mind it's very fleeting and shadowy and I have to sort of catch it out of the corner of my mind's eye before it disappears. Can't build whole scenes, never mind entire worlds.

Mostly I don't visualise anything with music, I *feel* stuff or *think about* stuff, so I might be imagining a place or a story but more in mood and language than visuals. I did click "no mental images" for this reason, but I think that's not quite true. Particularly if I'm listening with my eyes closed, I will get colours and patterns, and sometimes I'll get bits of performances or memories. It's just more usual for me to be feeling/thinking, rather than visualising.

It’s very dependent on the style of music. There’s music for the body, music for the mind, music for the spirit. In my case there’s very immersive electronic or jazz music that make me drift out while I focus on the textures, patterns and sounds. There’s genres like folk and hip hop that are more focused on storytelling where I don’t really “see” things unless there’s something unusual or slightly psychedelic about the production. And then there’s party music or more physically charged music where I don’t think much at all as it is more designed to sing or dance or just be awed at the technical proficiency of the musicians.

I mean, it’s in part “my training” and also “my job” but my brain is just constantly Shazaming all ambient sounds without any conscious decision-making. Last night I sat with my brother on a noisy patio and couldn’t hear the faintest frequency spikes coming from the interior speakers, so faint, barely audible over the outdoor conversation, and my brain (without interrupting our conversation) heard certain glimmers of phrases and ID’d the track without even thinking about it (not actually, I don’t know the name of the band, something like Revolustica or Revolonicon, that one-hit wonder UK band with the song “Baby I’m Ready To Go”). I think I’d best describe it as “I hear music and see numbers and notes”

no "lost in the sound, just listening" option :(

A few other pertinent questions might include:

- How often do you have music running through your head? Do you feel like you have a melody or song stuck in your head at all times or just some of the time? Are earworms a blessing or a curse?
- Do you ever dream about music, or find that your mind "composes" or thinks of music at night?

I'm definitely in the "something else" category. I don't know anything about music beyond what certain instruments sound like - I can't read music, don't know what any chords are called and certainly can't pick them out on a keyboard, can't even play a steady rhythm without getting distracted - so when I review music (which I do a lot, obviously) I rely on poetic metaphor to explain to the reader what I'm hearing. But that requires conscious thought while listening, and translation to words on a page. I don't spontaneously have those thoughts while listening - "Oh, this Cecil Taylor solo sounds like a tray of glassware hurled down a marble staircase" (an actual example from the Taylor biography I wrote).

Another key point: getting an audio engineering degree, which required me to spend half a year working in a studio, fundamentally changed how I listen to music, because having any understanding at all (and my knowledge is 20 years out of date now, but still) of how records are made breaks the illusion forever. To pick just one example, Dave Grohl's drumming on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is basically a loop; he played one verse and one chorus and the producer and engineer spliced the whole song together. The engineer I studied with isolated the drums, showed our class that, and I can never hear that song the same way again - the "three punk rock dudes thrashing it out in a room" vibe they wanted to create is gone forever, for me. I can hear the elements more clearly than the whole.

(Lately I am having similar thoughts about movies - I find myself looking at shots and editing, and picking the movie apart in my mind, laying the shots down on a mental table so I see them more like comic book panels than moving images.)

How often do you have music running through your head?

ALWAYS - mostly a blessing

Do you ever dream about music

I have dreamed about seeing bands, but not about music per se as an isolated thing

Mostly I don't visualise anything with music, I *feel* stuff or *think about* stuff, so I might be imagining a place or a story but more in mood and language than visuals. I did click "no mental images" for this reason, but I think that's not quite true. Particularly if I'm listening with my eyes closed, I will get colours and patterns, and sometimes I'll get bits of performances or memories. It's just more usual for me to be feeling/thinking, rather than visualising.

― emil.y, Wednesday, 4 March 2026 16:41 (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this is partly where the Susan Rogers book falls flat a bit in that her study only seems to account for what one "pictures" in one's minds when we hear music. Ir doesn't take into account the whole spectrum of "feelings" which can be very hard to describe. And that can also break down into emotional feelings like melancholy or joy. But texture also. And there are more abstract "vibey" "feelings" that are almost impossible to describe, like the feeling of "fudge" for example - not necessarily the look, taste or even texture, but the "aura" and "vibe" of what fudge is. The intrinsic "meaning" of fudge, hahah

Do you ever dream about music, or find that your mind "composes" or thinks of music at night?

this does happen to me (though not very often) and i pretty much always forget the melody within 20 minutes of waking

Another key point: getting an audio engineering degree, which required me to spend half a year working in a studio, fundamentally changed how I listen to music, because having any understanding at all (and my knowledge is 20 years out of date now, but still) of how records are made breaks the illusion forever.

Interestingly, Dr Susan Rogers, whose book kicked-off my initial thoughts for this thread, began her career as an audio engineer, moving later into academia. And it's really telling, just the way she writes and her approach to her subject. She doesn't seem to be able to quite leave her audio production hat and the biases that go with it at the door. That's one of the most frustrating things about the book, tbh, because I feel she makes some quite wild assumptions and great leaps about how other people hear music.

many xps but letter/colour synaethesia, I'm fairly sure is not at all related to any posters etc when I was young. for a start the main graphic I can remember was an alphabet placemat all in red, yellow and blue, whereas my colours don't align with that at all, or any expected colour palette - greens and browns are prominent with only E being yellow.

perhaps interestingly, I have issues remembering/confusing some Japanese words in Romaji because they use a lot of similar colours in similar patterns, whereas in English my synaesthesia only ever helps me (spell, differentiate, recall words etc) afaicr.

And there are more abstract "vibey" "feelings" that are almost impossible to describe, like the feeling of "fudge" for example - not necessarily the look, taste or even texture, but the "aura" and "vibe" of what fudge is.

Yes! I do have a constant annoying chatterbox of a brain so I'm normally thinking in language, but there is definitely a whole separate way of thinking that is inexpressible, deep, gut knowledge of a thing. Imageless, wordless, just... knowledge.

spitting thoughts immediately to avoid overthinking; feels more accurate in this case

if i'm not paying a ton of attention to the music- what often pops into my head is hazy memories/images of times and places i'd frequently listen to said album, on the bus, old apartment, who was around, etc

if i'm completely focused on it- texture, color, patterns. this is easily and frequently influenced by the album art obv but it's not literal

this also reminds me of Richard Feynman's famous experiment (well sort of) with how people count numbers in their heads

https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/6t3dwk/richard_feynman_discusses_how_he_found_out_that/

I typically think of a given piece of music as a system or a constellation of component parts, but then it varies as to whether i'm thinking about the component parts of a literal story or thesis (e.g. for lyrics-forward stuff, where typically my mind produces something that resembles an advert for a film) or the the component parts of the music (e.g. for instrumental music, where typically I think of something that looks like a patent design for a contraption). Either way it's always:
https://cdn-useast1.kapwing.com/static/templates/charlie-conspiracy-always-sunny-in-philidelphia-meme-template-regular-eb8e60f6.webp

i guess the "autobiographical memories from my past" one, though it's really just rooms/places where i've been, sometimes the ones where i first made a connection to the music. so for my most formative music, the streets of Helena mainly.

the "musician(s) performing the song" one is and always has been the furthest thing from my mind. i think i love going to shows partly because i'm so bad at imagining music being made.

can be coloured abstract forms moving around. Can be half picturing a narrative, can be some images from my past.
can be picturing a band performing, not necessarily the one playing per se.
& can be several of those during the duration of the track playing.

can also be random film like clips.
So I'm thinking 70s OGWT videos, but not sure how close that comes.

I don't think about musicians playing the music but when I'm listening to like John Coltrane or Miles I like to remember that I'm hearing the actual sound of the breath coming out of their body (through a bit of brass)

the "musician(s) performing the song" one is and always has been the furthest thing from my mind. i think i love going to shows partly because i'm so bad at imagining music being made.

Relate to this. I'm often surprised by music videos and how they can augment the way I feel about a piece of music. Ever watch one and think "Oh... okay...!"?

When I was very young it didn't occur that the music my parents played was made in a studio with people singing and playing instruments. It all came from a mysterious black disc in the corner of the room.

My dad liked Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" - who knew or cared about the ins and outs of how that record was made? The repetitive "Ah ah ah ah" was literally made by the disc - that was the sound of the record spinning, to me.

Save TOTP, which I don't remember being on, there wasn't much music TV. So whether Musical Youth or Irene Cara, I had no reference point for what the players looked like. It was just "songs".
Strangely enough my inner picture of what Demis Roussos looked like matched reality uncannily closely: I saw the singer on "My Reason" as a big chubby angel singing from atop a cloud.

The black disc was something I would bring my own images and feelings to. I grew up bilingual. And that might be why I'm not such a big lyrics person: Like many, it's the sounds of the words that are important rather than the meanings.
I remember getting the notion as a kid that lyrics were to be understood as part of a conversation one might hear on the street: An anecdote told to my mum by a friend as they crossed paths on the way to the shops. A dull story you would tune out of as they gabbed away about this and that. Lyrics, for the most part, were treated with the same patience as waiting for mum to get off the phone.

I don't think about musicians playing the music but when I'm listening to like John Coltrane or Miles I like to remember that I'm hearing the actual sound of the breath coming out of their body (through a bit of brass)

― Francis Fuck Coprolalia (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 5 March 2026 10:13 (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It definitely took me a while to appreciate that style of jazz because until you see clips of Miles/Coltrane playing their individual parts it can just sound like a form of organised chaos.
With rock music it can be exciting to see the musicians play - but even as someone who plays instruments myself, it helps a lot if there's a performance involved.
Seeing how the sausage gets made can kill the mystique for me sometimes. Can't tell you how many times I've gone to see a band I'm really excited about and then never wanted to listen to them after - it's something to do with "Well, I know how that works now; what's the point?". Likewise I've ruined a few songs I love for myself by learning them on guitar: "It's just a bunch of chords! There is no magic ingredient!"

But there are exceptions - lots of them. The 'Stop Making Sense' show by Talking Heads is an exercise in showing the audience "how it's made". But that in itself has mystery and novelty to it I guess.

Totally fascinating discussion. Several of the options are at least sometimes true for me, it depends a lot on the particular music and my relationship to it. I definitely sometimes "see" the players, if it's an artist I know well, although not in some word-for-word beat-for-beat sense. But images that kind of embody what I know of the song or band. Some kinds of music produce more abstract lines, colors and shapes — I get that more with jazz and electronic music, particularly without vocals. I think I also often get sort of settings or moods with some music — a misty forest, a muddy meadow, places I've been or seen or imagined that create a feeling that resonates with the feeling I get from the music.

Here's some songs I know well from a playlist I made, put on shuffle:

"Trash," New York Dolls: Certainly I can "see" David Johansen, but more what I get is kind of murky basement bar vibes, dirty bathrooms, sticky floor.

"The Harder They Come," Jimmy Cliff: Showing the force of cultural programming, despite knowing what Jimmy Cliff looks like and also having seen the movie several times, I still mostly get kind of beachy Caribbean scenery.

"When the World Is Running Down," The Police: I loved the Police in middle school, they were my first favorite band, so I have heard this song untold hundreds/thousands of times. But even though it has some fairly specific lyrics (a videotape of the TAMI Show e.g.), they are very much a shapes and colors band to me. Bright yellow-orange bursts from the guitar slashes, a burbling purple line for the bass, some kind of cavern.

"Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," Ramones: I do NOT picture Ronald Reagan here, or even really the Ramones. Mostly from the opening onward it feels like a big turbo-charged train roaring across the plains. (German plains? Maybe who knows.)

"King Kunta," Kendrick Lamar: Sure I can see Kendrick, but the walking bassline beat mostly gives me feet moving down a sidewalk. Which I just now realized is also the actual video for "Billie Jean," which has a similar loping beat — MJ knew what he was doing.

Etc. Interesting exercise. I think overall for me music produces a jumble of neural sensations that definitely have visual elements — but those elements can range from specific like Bruegel to impressionistic to abstract.

^ banger post tipsy

loved reading everybody's thoughts on this, fascinating to learn how everyone's brain works. i have related to a lot of people in here, and feel like i mostly experience a combination of all of these options. here are a bunch of unrelated thoughts as i try to process how my own brain works haha

i'll start by answering one of dog latin's supplemental questions

How often do you have music running through your head? Do you feel like you have a melody or song stuck in your head at all times or just some of the time? Are earworms a blessing or a curse?

- all the fucking time. there is always some piece of music running through my head. it's both voluntary and involuntary. i have something of a photographic memory for sounds, where i can hear something a couple of times and then play it back in my brain as if i am actually listening to it. it's not fully reliable, and often i will only remember parts of songs, or imagine that a little flourish that only happens once in a song recurs throughout, or hear a bass movement or harmony my brain adds that isn't part of the original recording. but it has definitely helped me as a musician, as i can basically hear any song and play it on the piano, and can play a whole song with just a chord chart.

- it also can be a curse, yes, as some songs stick so hard in my brain that it can drive me a little crazy. when i was a teenager, i used to have a song that i would use as a kind of mental palate cleanser, catchy enough to replace my unwanted earworm and pleasant enough that i didn't mind it running through my brain. that song was..."the sweet escape" by gwen stefani and akon.

- another after effect of this "photographic" sonic memory is that i have never been able to compose music of my own. i play something, it instantly reminds me of another song that i've heard, and i start playing that instead. part of it is probably a lack of the required self confidence (or self-delusion) that one needs to be a songwriter, that i could possibly write something that someone else would want to hear. as a musician, i have resigned myself to a role as an appreciator and an interpreter, not a creator or bandleader.

i approach music mostly as an appreciator of a fine artform. to me, listening to a song can feel like looking at a painting or watching a movie or having a bite of ice cream. i know more about music and music-making than i do, say, painting, or filmmaking, or ice-cream making, so i put more thought into how sounds are made and harmonic structure and so forth. at a base, i am always at least somewhat cognizant of the instruments and players and how they talk to each other. but the main thing that music does in my brain is create a palace that i can inhabit for a while. what i picture or imagine varies from song to song and artist to artist. i could probably come up with an example for each of the poll options, tho often the options might blend in my brain.

i'll use the beatles as an example: i can't listen to their early records without picturing the four lads happily bashing away as the audience screams. as they become more of a studio band, i am more likely to picture scenery (e.g., "penny lane") or patterns (e.g., the instrumental break of "a day in the life" or the intro to "i am the walrus" or all of "tomorrow never knows") or generate a movie in my head of the story being told (e.g. "eleanor rigby," "for no one"). buuuut, listening to the anthology version of the tracks, or that recent remaster of the white album, puts me right back in the "people in a room making music" space.

it's not fully reliable, and often i will only remember parts of songs

Ha, made me immediately think of this classic thread: A thread for Steve n.'s list of songs that his boss sings

oh god i do relate to that. i know my wife has heard me wail something like, "only weeeee can...work it out!" from tears for fears' "mothers talk," a song i don't think she's ever heard before, for a full day

xp Moodles, even if it's, say techno, which I know you enjoy a lot - do you think in quite literal terms of "I wonder how this was made / I would like to make this"?

yes, especially with techno, I spend lots of long hours listening to certain tracks or collections of tracks over and over, trying to discern what the individual parts and layers are and how they all work together.

xp omg that thread, I hope Steve n. found another job

He did! He's doing very well these days (he was the singer in my old band and remains one of my besties to this day).

I am afflicted with earworms in a major way. I wake up just about every morning with something stuck in my head - often a verse or a line from Paul's Boutique or some old Metallica album (good) or a Billy Joel song (very bad). Sometimes I won't know what it is, because it'll just be a guitar riff or a bass line, and I'll have to actually think about it... what is that? where do I remember it from? And a couple of hours later, after "listening" to it on a loop all morning, I'll say, oh! That's the bass intro to "Summertime Rolls" by Jane's Addiction!

^^ same

^ this is common for me too, often the earworm will be something I haven't heard in years ... the other day it was a phrase from a Sousa march

I think at least 25% of the time it's a hook from Beck's "Where It's At" for whatever reason

one time we were in this internet cafe in Peru and they were playing Toto's "Rosanna" and it stayed in my head unwillingly for like 3-4 days, I was PISSED

there are (it seems) hundreds of 70s soft rock/pop tracks that trigger painful and persistent earworms for me, I dread hearing them in the wild

well not painful but ykwim

I'll say, oh! That's the bass intro to "Summertime Rolls" by Jane's Addiction!

lol the bass intro to "Mountain Song" ranks high in my earworm rotation.

for me its the bridge to "Shadow Stabbing" by Cake, the part that goes "I'm so nervous, I'm so tense/my heart can't forget about this self defense", I can't identify why that part is so catchy but every time I hear it it sticks in my head for an entire week

Once or twice I've been kept awake because there's part of a song going round and round my head like a twisted merry-go-round

I also relate to unperson's thing of trying to trace the source of an earworm. I tend to know roughly where and when I might have first heard it and eventually trace it through that. Only today it turned out to be Blur's obscure instrumental "Eine Kleine Nacht Musik". Sometimes i use Google's version of shazam - literally sing the melody line into it and it tells me

Regular fixtures:

"Whip It" by Devo, especially if I'm getting ready to go somewhere and I'm in a hurry

The single line "What if your world should fall apart?" from Neil Young / St Etienne's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart"

Lots of things by Pavement and Paul McCartney, especially the Ram album

I get earworms too. The worm du jour is "Light Night Mountains All That" which is great, I love that for me.

I also dream music. Sometimes I'll dream a song that I've never heard before, sometimes by a real life artist. A few nights ago I was treated to a bit of an Open Mike Eagle track which does not exist. Of course I can't remember anything about it now aside from the vaguest impression.

What's mad is going to bed with a tune in my head and wake up with it the next day, which must mean I've been thinking about it even in deep sleep.

I've definitely dreamt of music.
I recently dreamt of a late-80s/early-90s dance-pop classic in the style of Buffalo Stance or Ride On Time. It was so vivid, the next morning I had to go on the internet and go through a bunch of playlists to find out what it was.

Other time's it's been completely indescribable but also very beautiful. I have a distinct memory of hearing a piece of vocal music that was like The Flower Duet on steroids and woke up in tears.

For people who are aphantasic, I wonder about your relationship to literature. Is it especially difficult to read fiction, or does it not really work like that? My partner claims to be aphantasic and says she struggles with fantasy but doesn't mind stuff that's grounded in reality.

I don't really see any images when listen to music. Surprised to be in such a minority on this thread.

I can read literature fine (well, as much as I can concentrate on any text).

How often do you have music running through your head? Do you feel like you have a melody or song stuck in your head at all times or just some of the time? Are earworms a blessing or a curse?

I have music running through my head quite a lot (right now it's a guitars from The Boy with the Arab Strap), which I generally tolerate rather than really enjoying or hating. But I also call music to mind deliberately (or, semi-deliberately – right now I just found Laura Nyro's The Bells float into my mind and wanted to "play" it more so stayed with it) and that's more fun.

yeah I definitely don't see any images or colors. like Moodles it's more that I am either parsing, analyzing, or appreciating specific sounds

There's sometimes daydreaming along the lines of option 1 but it's not visual. And when I was younger, more kind of "method acting" where I'd imagine the song is really about my life and loves.

ok it's true I do have vague imagery associated with "story songs" like "Rocky Raccoon" or whatever

Squeeze "Up The Junction" another one

My aphantasia isn’t total but my powers of visualization are weak. In response to cues like “Picture a sunset” my mental imagery is fleeting, schematic, and mostly colorless. I wasn’t aware that many people have richer mental imagery until I read about aphantasia a few years ago.

Re literature, I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but I read a lot and enjoy it. I like visually descriptive prose, though sometimes I’ll have to reread a sentence a few times to feel I’ve made sense of it.

Music evokes little or no mental imagery for me. Even live recordings of shows I attended don’t evoke what I saw with any clarity. Neither my knowledge of performers or my comprehension of lyrics stimulates imagery. I don’t have visual responses to symphonic or electronic music either. There’s more proprioception in my reaction to tones, rhythm, timbre, harmony, etc., I feel music much more than I see it.

Reading this thread, I’m … sort of glad? I think I like receiving sounds without my brain creating a parallel track of images. But I do wonder what it would be like!

I feel music much more than I see it.

this is what I was trying to say! ty

I've been quite surprised to find ITT that we music-feelers seem to be a minority.

same!

I've been surprised too! Full-blown and presumably rare synaesthesia and listening under the influence of hallucinogens aside, I don't think it ever really occurred to me that people had a strong visual response to listening at all. I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the mental imagery charts that go around, and I do visualise with literature, though maybe not especially vividly, and people especially are very vague.

My listening experience is definitely also 'feeling'-heavy in a way that's hard to explain, often something like a mental analogy of what I'm hearing - little pings around my consciousness for arpeggios, various kinds of tension, opening, closing, little fluctuations, etc. Maybe this is something like a very unsophisticated version of what fgti describes.

One thing that I have found is that the more I have learned about music over the years, the more involved my analytic mind is while listening--noticing aspects of composition, playing technique, arrangement, production, etc. It's an automatic thing that I can't really turn off, so it's just as much a part of my perception (and enjoyment!) as the immediate emotional impact. ...

― feed me with your chips (zchyrs),

Can relate, but luckily I can turn it off! Like I've noticed Doraian/Mixolodian/microtonal Maqam modal ideas really get to me, and particular folk-rockish chord progressions (I - bVII - IV ) can sneak up on me and make me feel weepy almost. So sometimes I listen and just analyze the mechanics. But I get to switch back and forth between that approach and them hitting hard.

It’s very dependent on the style of music. There’s music for the body, music for the mind, music for the spirit...

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Wednesday, March 4, 2026 11:44 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This too - yesterday I was working from home, and playing a psychedelic cumbia comp and it was mostly grooving background music, but then the bassline of a particular track hit and work halted and my body started wiggling to it. The function of the music suddenly clobbered the enticing textures. Involuntary responses to music are something I really chase, I guess.

As for imagery, I can relate to the "scenery and landscapes" and I could really relate to the idea of the thread "Songs that are rooms with many doors". Dub and bass music often feel like entering ever deeper chambers in a huge mansion or temple.

I was cleaning up the house a few months ago, and found an old Rubik's Snake puzzle under a bed, and since then I find it immensely pleasurable to listen to krautrock and play with the thing. It's a kinetic sensory thing, but there's some kind of nostalgia happening too, these brainy 1970s sounds paired with a toy that reminds me of childhood brutalist buildings and geodesic domes.

I also find it harder to pull big emotional reactions from headphone listening, gotta be speakers. And live music is a different thing altogether - there I feel like analysis and imagery wilt in the face of the direct experience and human interaction.

xxp though maybe for me there are exceptions, the first coming to mind being things that sound very tactile, whether that's conventionally non-musical things being scraped or hit or rustled, or instruments played or treated in a way that also brings out the materiality, e.g. buzzing guitar strings. In those cases I think I would tend to do a bit of visualising of the actions, or imagined actions.

yeah i am def a feeler more than a picturer

3d animated gift of album cover

I picture the musician(s) performing the song or musical piece onstage, in the studio, or in a video
I imagine myself performing the song or piece of music
Scenery takes shape in my mind, such as a river, a mountain, a planet etc
I see patterns, colours, shapes that don't represent anything specific

I alternate between these four, depends on the kind of music. When it's rock or other music with recognizable typical instruments like guitars, etc. and/or vocals I usually imagine somebody playing the guitar and singing and sometimes that person is me.
More pastoral stuff I picture fields, rivers, etc.
Most other stuff is just abstract shapes and textures, not so much colours though.

I think partly because of this I tend to favour more abstract electronic stuff where I don't recognize many individual sounds. Because I can't recognize any instruments and identify how it would be played my mind just defaults to abstract shapes. It feels like a purer form of music to my mind because of this, just pure sounds, not something somebody played and recorded. I know rationally that that's not how it is, but that's how my mental imagery works. I tend to try to avoid watching music videos for the most part because it creates an association between the music and fixed visuals which kind of ruins songs for me.

I'm only a bad amateur musician, but it's interesting to me how knowing something about the mechanics does and doesn't affect how I experience music as a listener. My primary instrument is drums, so definitely I'm more attuned to rhythmic structures than I probably would be without that, and I know enough about chord progressions and key changes etc to recognize and register them — at least in pop contexts, jazz is worlds beyond me (though I am aware at least of time signatures). But I'm not sure how much that really affects my experience as a listener, which tends to be pretty immersive in the thing as a whole rather than as component parts. If I really like a song I might spend some time working out how it all goes together, but that's a conscious analytic exercise, it's not what I just naturally do when I'm listening. I'm especially not very attuned to lyrics except in the cases of some specific writers. There are songs I love that I've heard a thousand times that I would need to look up the lyrics to if I were going to quote them.

i think i perceive most music like a series of visuals, not colors necessarily. usually abstract shapes, like when the synth comes in on New Order's Perfect Kiss it's like sheets of static-like silvery rain drenching everything else (all the dots and lines) and then vanishing when it drops away.

for other music i might visualize a landscape, or maybe even the musicians...depends on the music, i guess. if it's jazz and it's Art Blakey's version of A Night in Tunisia, I can see those guys jamming together in the studio. if it's a Miles Davis song like It Never Entered My Mind, I might see a rainy, mostly desolate street at night. idk.

Thinking about Miles, the main Miles I was exposed to as a kid was Sketches of Spain, which I loved. (My parents aren't really jazz people, but I think everyone who went to college in the '60s had that album.) And I think that album as much as anything really shaped my early thinking about Spain itself — I couldn't really picture much, but it sounded dusty, romantic, steeped in history. When I finally saw Rioja and Navarre decades later, it was weirdly like I'd imagined from the music.

I'm a mix of "imagine them performing" and "imagine me performing."

I don't remember how I perceived music before I started making it. But at this point I cannot help but think about the mechanics of it.

A bit like peace, man's open mic post. With the wrinkle that if I am listening to music as a prelude to performing it I will frequently stop listening to the record so as not to be unduly influenced.

If I listen to "Under BOAC" by Autechre, I picture being inside a gigantic clockwork machine, like a grandfather clock as tall as the Eiffel Tower, with enormous springs being wrenched and pulled.

question for you, dog latin: do you see this same image every time you hear "boac" or does the image change from listen to listen? does the height of the grandfather clock change each time? does the entire scene change? or is it always the same machine, always as tall as the eiffel tower, always with the same springs being wrenched and pulled?

(and are there songs where you see different, unrelated images depending which section of the song you're listening to?)

sometimes it's sort of like the sea of holes in yellow submarine

I get zero mental images when I listen to instrumental music. I guess in music with lyrics, I might sometimes picture something if the lyrics are depicting a visual image (e.g. singer says "dont picture an elephant", I would probably picture an elephant). But in general, visual imagery is not part of my experience of music.

[slightly defensive post] despite the perhaps overly-methodical description of "how I perceive music", it is very deeply felt, just not as colours or images or anything like that

By nature and incubation I am very analytical, and rhisappplies to music as much as anything else and it also intersects with my tendency to always put myself on the edge of things. If I picture myself anyway it in the control booth, assembling or disassembling the music, thinking about the relationship between the notes or the positions of the musicians in the studio. There’s something really engaging in thinking about how the limitations or characteristics of instruments or recording technology. This goes through visual art as well, stuff that resonates often has something intersting in technique or medium or technology.

As a result I find it really hard to have music on when I’m doing anything mathematical and really can’t fall asleep to music because it activates too much of the brain.

Didn't mention working out how you move to relevant sounds. just realising on hearing something with a groove. That I still have the urge to move to a beat if it's the right beat. & if it's a hip shake or a foot flick or what.
Used to enjoy dancing , should get back into doing it more.
Cos one thin g I could do pretty well was dance and continually come up with moves.

question for you, dog latin: do you see this same image every time you hear "boac" or does the image change from listen to listen? does the height of the grandfather clock change each time? does the entire scene change? or is it always the same machine, always as tall as the eiffel tower, always with the same springs being wrenched and pulled?

― fact checking cuz, Thursday, 5 March 2026 23:42 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Good question.

I should have phrased my original post better: I don't so much imagine I'm physically inside the clock, rather it's the concept of the clock that comes to mind. So it's half-and-half semi-visual/semi-conceptual.

The image will change from listen to listen, and also as the track goes on - like a music video with different scenes - a close-up of a giant spring being pulled taut; a huge cog turning; great tuned tines being hammered etc. Sometimes I also think of helmeted military pilots exploring the inner workings of the clock in a jet plane ("Is it washable" is surreal radio chatter).

It feels very obvious and literal to me that this is the imagery being communicated by the producers of the music, as opposed to "it is just an electronic composition", which of course it is.

Of course I can hear it as a pure piece of electronic music - even dance music - and get all nerdy about their origins in hip-hop and rave culture.

But it is also a grand old Gothic clockwork monument. That, as I say, is very clear to me.
Same as "Xylin Room" is like being in the boughs of a creaky old wooden ship, zooming closer and closer into the fabric and the knots of the wood it's been built out of.
Or how "irlite (get o)" is a fight in a swamp between a large formless creature and a swarm of killer bees.

I get that this is all about as exciting as describing one's dreams (i.e. boring AF), but also it feels so obvious that I always thought everyone who is a fan of Autechre hears/perceives their music in this way.

It makes me wonder about how Autechre themselves hear their music. When I interviewed Rob years ago, I really tried to get him to open up about what he and Sean were thinking about conceptually when they composed. Were they thinking in these evocative, fantastical ways? Were they beset by some specific emotion when writing a track? Were they thinking in any conceptual way, even if it was "I want to deconstruct breaks music in this specific way", or was it just machines and algorithms to them?

In practice, the answers I got were fascinating but not fully what I expected.

But, I mean, many composers of classical music and film scores attempt to tell a story through their music, so I don't think it's so strange to think about music in terms of evoking a narrative or imagery.

I'm definitely not aphantasic but I rarely get visual imagery from music, Autechre's Confield is a rare exception but even then it's quite vague - huge underground spaces, giant armoured chthonic creatures. Bine makes me think of a superfast underground train journey but in quite an abstract way. Most of their other music doesn't do this for me - Under BOAC might create vague images of metallic things being hit but nothing like as specific as what you see.

many composers of classical music and film scores attempt to tell a story through their music

Typically involving a cartoon mouse and a broom, iirc

Thinking about music videos that work well in terms of "visuals" - one people come back to a lot is Star Guitar, but I can't stand it, it's exactly the idea that I've had (& I guess many people have had) so many times while sitting on a train or in a car and staring out of a window, but the execution just isn't there, it just doesn't feel like the music to me, the shapes made out of the window do not feel like the music. A much better one is Autechre - Gantz Graf, completely abstract at first, but so is the music.

Funny you mention those because they're both extremely important videos for me. I love the Star Guitar video, even if when I hear the song I wouldn't think "This makes me think of a train journey", the execution is so well done. And yeah, Gantz Graf is as close to what I see when I hear a lot of Autechre's music I guess.

Typically involving a cartoon mouse and a broom, iirc

― calmer chameleon (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 6 March 2026 12:14 (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's called (a)Fantasia for a reason, I suppose

when i first saw the options i felt like: strategies for listening.
Or maybe ways to spice up yr pitchfork review.

but ive really appreciated the range of responses from instinctual to conceptual.

I think i kinda try to engage with what the music is doing?

Like...is it making me wanna dance? In an environment where people are dancing? Or ...

Is it asking me to notice what happens acoustically in a room when two pianos play the same phrase repeatedly but go in and out of phase?

Is it loud?
Is my whole body an ear?

Who the fuck is playing that line?

Is it referential? Reverential? Homemade? Deeply fucking spiritual? Angry?

Not only what it does but how what it does works...

beautiful answer, bert

One thing that I am realizing this morning is that those winamp music visualizers really had a long lasting effect on how I visualize music

as shapes, or more precisely, as edges of shapes

Aye with wo many screens on everything I'm surprised Milkdrop isn't built into absolutely everything by default

*so

Music is not primarily a mental experience for me at all. Its more of a bodily experience. Good music hits me in the chest, and if its really good, sometimes further south as well.

many composers of classical music and film scores attempt to tell a story through their music

One of my favorite pieces of writing about music in literature is this passage in Howard's End, describing Helen's whole imaginative framework for Beethoven's Fifth: https://www.online-literature.com/forster/howards_end/5/

i think holger czukay recorded movies while watching actual movies and trying to convey a real immersive lysergic cinematic experience in music form, like going even deeper than a "soundtrack" into a "visual movie" or some such, with horizonal breathing dynamics

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yowzer

crikey so you haven't all gone bonkers then

https://15questions.net/interview/rasmus-oppenhagen-krogh-about-magic-sounds/page-1/

disappointed there's no "i create a strawman who's wrong about my opinion so i simply argue with myself until another thing worth belittling comes along." maybe that's what "something else" meant?

either way, what a disingenuous bunch.