Like I genuinely feel if I’ve heard a song enough times, I can repeat it in my head and still get the same enjoyment as actually listening to it. Maybe everyone can do that idk
But I do know that the only thing I don’t have is speed, otherwise I’d basically have perfect pitch 🥲
there are so many amazing talented people out there. if only we had a system dedicated to human flourishing instead of profit
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould
That’s your mind’s ear! It can be more vivid or less vivid depending on the person. Neat trick I learned in college that everyone in the room could do (we were all musicians, so may be biased). You can take any melody and hear it as a different instrument. You can make yourself hear it as a flute or as a guitar or as a trumpet. And getting good at this skill can make it so you can hear entire fully harmonized orchestras in your head on command. It’s wild.
Edit: I suppose the specific instruments you can hear would be culturally dependent just because of frequency of exposure. Like I’m pretty good at hearing a full metal band playing including what effects are on what instruments, but I have a hard time imagining a duduk play a simple melody.
I’m now listening to freebird on piccolo and it’s pretty good! Thanks
I too have a jukebox in my head. And I love to sing! Unfortunately, I’m totally tone deaf.
No one is tone deaf. Matching pitch is a skill that can be learned (actually it’s 3 separate skills and you may already be good at 1 or 2 of them without knowing). I studied voice in college and saw a fellow student go from being unable to match pitch to being one of the most sought after singers in our class. It just takes practice and usually a patient teacher who knows what exercises will help.
Lol you can’t drop something like that and then not mention what the three skills are!
Okay, so I misremembered slightly. The 3 skills make up perfect pitch specifically. If I’m remembering correctly now, there’s hearing relative pitch in your head, there’s hearing the absolute pitch of songs from memory, and there’s matching the pitch of your voice to the pitch in your head or to another instrument you hear. So there may actually be people who are very good at two of the skills but you’d never know because they don’t have good voice control.
Okay, that doesn’t get my hopes up, but thank you for more info.
I learned how to hear my pitch through a pitch tuning app. After singing to it for hours for 2 years now? I have a better sense when shits not hitting
For me it’s torturous sometimes because I’ll hear 5 seconds of a song in a grocery store or something, and the rest of the day I’m listening to a Celene Dion song on repeat.
This happened to me early yesterday and it drove me crazy as my brain wouldn’t stop replaying the 5 seconds the whole goddang day until i found out what it was and played it. Twice. Stupidass brain
I have had this last for years. Perfectly hearing the same 5 seconds of a song I can’t remember the name of until I randomly hear the phrase like 2 years later
That sounds a bit tiring and a tiny bit scary… but after 2 years i can’t imagine the euphoria hit
It’s not constant but it’s noticeable; at quiet times I’ll be thinking of some music and I’ll get that repeating music excerpt thing for a while until it goes away when I’m distracted by something else. It’s not so much intrusive as “that song again where did I hear that?”
It’ll come back soon enough but funnily, it doesn’t stick around after I’ve found out the full thing. One I remember most was the plants vs zombies 1 rooftop theme which I hadn’t heard for 2-3 years. And yes it was a cathartic “Quest Complete!” when I found it again
I have the same thing and apparently most people don’t have this
that sounds like a great thing to have!
I have aphantasia and no inner monologue. Unfortunately the only times I can “hear” music in my mind is when it’s stuck in my head and manages to repeat so loudly it breaks out of my silent thoughts
I have aphantasia and no inner monologue.
I sincerely wonder what it’s like for you to play Disco Elysium, if you have, because the game’s narration is basically loud simulated internal monologue.
For me, yes, it can get that noisy, even intrusive.
Can’t speak on that game in particular but I will say that I fucking love games where I can hear the protagonists thoughts. Dishonored comes to mind, especially the second one.
Beyond that, I can force an inner monologue if I’m focused enough, and it comes around on its own occasionally when I’m writing (like right now because I’m so conscious of it lol) so my head isn’t as silent as some people’s, but certainly not as loud as most
Thanks for the insight; I’m truly intrigued because you live such a different experience than I do.
Ever play Dead Space 2? The protagonist talks (and shouts) through a lot of memorable moments there, too.
Unfortunately I skipped out on a lot of the popular games from the last two decades because of a combination of money problems and misguided desire to be different.
My gaming history is basically just various flash games > ruining my life with dota 2 > Skyrim for one summer > indie roguelites/idle games lol
I have a gap like that from the 90s to the early 2000s myself where I was so caught up in things that I didn’t really play games at all, so that’s relatable.
I do this too.
If I do the internal orchestra carefully enough, I get shivers just like the first time I heard it.
I can often listen to like a 5 or so songs I currently like on repeat for many hours a day, many days in a row. I’m autistic, too.
I can relate hard. Music is such an emotional and nostalgic experience for me in so many ways.
I get this. I do play music in my head all time or even involuntarily. Sometimes it just loops on parts and not a full song.
I have a pretty good mind’s ear too, not perfect though. I also have perfect* pitch and also audio-visual synesthesia, I see music as colors in my head. One of my favorite things to do is play covers of song on piano by ear. I’m also autistic. Music is just so cool.
(* there are different levels of absolute/perfect pitch and mine isn’t the best, I’m not really able to identify complex jazz chords or individual notes in large stacks of notes for example, but other people with perfect pitch can)
I pretty much always have music playing in my head whether I want it or not. Too bad I’m not trained in music at all to be able to take advantage of it
