Visual imagination - the ability to actually SEE objects that you are thinking about, as if you were looking at them, has been in the news recently. A lot of people are confusing the ability to visualise with the ability to imagine, but of course there are many different possible ways to imagine (tactile, emotional, proprioceptive…)
Audio seems to be the next most obvious, after visual. I myself have a pretty good audio imagination. I hear voices quite clearly in my head (generally speaking when I WANT to, fortunately…) and it’s not unknown for me, while thinking deeply about a piece of music, to feel the need to walk round the house just to check I didn’t accidentally leave a radio on somewhere. I wonder how common this is.
If I’m imagining a piece of music (remembering or reading a score) I’m pretty accurately rendering maybe two or three of the instruments or voices. The remaining parts turn into a vague mush that is occasionally elevated to something closer to real sound when I pay attention to that particular part.
We used to have a theory that the theme from Beverley Hills Cop was the “stickiest” song known to civilization, and would inevitably drive out any lesser melodies. For bonus points … as played in beeps by my spouse’s ex-flatmate’s washing machine (yes, there is a washing machine out there that will play Axel F, on purpose).
Either that, or “gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight”
If either of those does the trick … umm … you’re welcome!
I render complete songs in my head with full music and lyrics. It really isn’t a choice, and it never isn’t happening. And much of the time when I’m thinking, I “hear” myself in my head, exactly as if I was speaking aloud. If I’m thinking of a potential discussion with another, I hear both (or all) of us.
That’s kind of how I am. My audio imagination is far better than my visual one (which is somewhat odd, as I work in a very visual field, photography.) I’ve never gotten clear visual hallucinations, but mostly back in college, in periods of extreme tiredness and stress (typically after an all-night paper writing session), I would get these audio hallucinations that literally sounded like a radio playing in my ear. It wasn’t like “imagining” the sounds, but actually hearing them. Really, really weird and wonderful, but I don’t think I’ve gotten them since my college days.
I just realized something. I have loved three people deeply in my life. I can “hear” their voices very clearly in my head, if I try. Much more clearly than I can picture their faces. Everyone else is much more muddled sounding.
This reminds me of an old thread on the subject of visualization. (It’s interesting to read, but please don’t feed the zombie.)
I was surprised at the time to fond out that there are some people who can’t visualize, and I’m almost as surprised to find out that some people have no audio imagination. In neither case do I ever get the impression that I’m actually seeing or hearing something real (it’s not the same as hallucinating), but neither am I merely describing things inside my head.
At one point, I had something like perfect pitch and could “hear” the note of G in my head without any outside source. From there I could imagine a scale and ascend/descend to whatever note I wanted. I still have relative pitch and can hum , for example, a C if someone sounds a G. However, even when I was better at manipulating music in my head, it was nothing like actually hearing sound being played.
This reminds me of a anecdote I heard in high school about a former conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra (no idea who). Apparently, the conductor would frequently be found in the restroom with sheet music fanned out in front of him in the stall. He was able to read an entire orchestral score and hear it all in his head.
Gadzukes, I was the shittiest sight-reader ever. I always had a helluva time playing sheet music the first few times. But if I heard it played once for me, I could play it for you, no problem.
Like some others here, I’ve got excellent auditory recall for whatever music I’ve heard. I start playing the song in my head, and sometimes I get surprised by the little details/accompaniments that my brain is recalling and throwing in there.
I’m so jealous of those people. I can’t do that kind of thing at all. Sheet music just looks like Klingon to me, since I can only play the guitar, so that’s not even relevant. But even when I look at a sequence of guitar chords, I usually have little or no idea what the piece of music in question sounds like, before I sit down and play it. Or, actually, I also need to hear a recording of it. Chords or tabs alone don’t do it. Conversely, I’m also rubbish at working out how to play a piece just from hearing it (although I’ve been getting a lot better at that over time). Apparently, I need to be spoon fed through every orifice.
No imagination at all.
They say that when Mozart was composing, he could hear the music in his head, fully formed, orchestration and all. Writing it down was just a practical matter, like taking dictation.
I’m 45 and I can still use my imagination to hear any dialog you chose spoken in the voice of any of my classmates from 7th grade.
It’s funny when I meet them now some 32 years later, they look and sound nothing like they did when they were 13 years old, yet I can hear their 13 year-old voice plain as day in my head.
When he was still a teenager, Sun Ra would go to Birmingham (AL) to see big bands play. Later, he was able to produce an entire orchestral score for every song he heard. People who played with him tell stories of him writing entirely new songs, for all instruments and voices, without ever playing a note. Sometimes he would hand one or more players new parts to existing songs right before a performance, having just thought of them and written them down.
And I have a friend that I met while in college that used to come home from his humdrum day job with numbers and marks on small, pocket-size notebook paper. We’d all look at them and say “yeah, what is this?” whereby he’d go grab his guitar and play (and sing; yeah he wrote lyrics & melody at the same time he was writing the song in his head) the song he’d written while he was working his day job. Then he’d sit down at the drum kit and play the drum part. Then he’d play the bass part. Then he’d describe what the strings or piano should be doing. In just a few weeks, he learned and re-arranged more than 2 dozen Neil Diamond songs as punk rock songs, then taught 4 other people all their parts so that they could play some other friend’s of our’s wedding.
I wish like hell I could do that.
I hear stuff in my head ALL the time, but getting it out for anyone else to hear is a real struggle. I love my own music, but I miss the mark (reproducing what I hear in my head) like 99.99% of the time.
When I am consciously trying to imagine a sound it usually ends up with my “mental voice” imitating the sound. So, for a car I hear myself saying “vroom, vroom” or something equally pathetic. If I’m not consciously trying to hear the sound then I will be able to hear the appropriate noise.
My audio imagination is perfect. Music, sound effects, voices—it all comes through as clearly as crystal in my thoughts, and it makes falling asleep pleasant (my visual imagination is spot on too, so I can keep myself entertained easily). Frankly, I assumed everyone could imagine sounds and images just as well; this thread has shattered my ignorance on that.
Before I sound too boastful, I also admit I have zero musical skill. I can’t hum or sing notes correctly. I have no experience playing any instruments, so I wonder if it’s something I can work on, but there’s certainly no natural talent here.
Pretty awful. I can sort of grasp things I’ve heard before and replay/edit them a bit. The rare times I remember dreams there’s not really an audio component just a general awareness of receiving information I would hear. The one time I hallucinated from lack of sleep it was completely silent.
This is interesting - so far the polling in this thread is stronger towards the “good” end than the visualisation one.
I’m surprised. After all, we don’t seem to have an equivalent audio word for “visualisation”. “Imagination” has “image” as in visual, right there on the tin. All these little linguistic cues were adding up to an assumption that visuals are a preferred way of processing information, for the majority of people. I would have bet that more people were stronger visually than audially (?is that a word?)
Gives up the guitar forever.