Ostinato?
I think ostinato is a more generalized term for repeating patterns. The one I’m trying to identify is heard in many (if not most) Latin dance numbers after the melody/theme has been played straight and after the horns have had their shots at solos and when the percussionists start going ape-shit. Behind all the timbales, congas, bongos, guiros, washboards, and whatever else there is in the place to beat on, there’s this repeating figure that lasts maybe a bar or two (it may fit into the clave which is another term I’m not 100% on) and just goes on and on until the percussionists surrender and they play the main tune again close to straight and close it out.
Tito Puente and his imitators are all big on this approach much of the time.
I think it’s common if you play an instrument to get a loop of a riff or rhythm stuck on repeat in your head.
DH calls that an ‘ear worm’. The only way to get rid of an ear worm is to replace it with another ear worm. When he makes me mad, I give him bad ear worms- He hates that! Ha Ha!!
I’m not a musician, but can replay a David Grisman/Stephan Grapelli album in my head from beginning to end. That’s really the only one I can do that with.
I’m impressed! Pitch in Jean-Luc Ponty and Bela Fleck and you’re talking some fine music.
I assume you must be familiar with Grisman’s “Dawg Grass” efforts?
I’m another that hears songs as a loop. Usually the same refrain over and over, although if I concentrate, I can get the rest of the song.
I find myself singing it out loud when I’m alone. The same words, over and over…
Not well. If I concentrate, I can get one, maybe two, instruments clearly.
Also, usually I have just a short segment of a song looping in my head for a long time. I can change it if I try (sometimes) but I usually just don’t bother.
I can hear that now inside my head! It’s a pretty persistent one, too. I can “hear” the music all the time, and sometimes it’s almost like I actually am hearing it. Those times usually occur when something else noisy and droning is going on. For instance, if I’ve got a seat on a plane near the engines, I can drown out the droning sound by aggressively “thinking” the music in my head. It’s almost like a biologically hardwired IPod.
I have a lot of aural clues - if I hear something that sounds like the opening note from a song, off it goes. I tend to speak in lyrics, too - there’s always something appropriate for a conversation. Fortunately, my husband knows as much music as I do, so he usually gets my drift.
I also find that the song in my head (and I have a constant song in my head, too, like most of us here, apparently) matches what I’m doing. In fact, I get clues about how I feel about something from the song an activity or conversation brings out. Apparently I sing quietly all the time, too - when I was first getting to know my husband, he was a little put off by it until he realized it wasn’t me ignoring him, it was just the soundtrack in my head coming out.
I bet the rest of you are kick-ass at “Name That Tune,” too. 
Sometimes before I fall asleep or when I’m a bit drunk I hear music and I don’t even know what it is. It’ll be whole arrangements with lots of parts going on at once and when I listen to it, and it’s like listening to a weird radio. A melody will come back from before and everything, so that it sounds composed, but I can tell it isn’t a memory because it’s not familiar and it isn’t really that great. Like if you heard it on the radio you’d say, “what the hell is that supposed to be it sounds like something a backseat full of kids would write.” What weirds me out about it is how many instruments I can hear. A lot of time it features trombone in the dixieland style which is ultra bizarre because I’ve never played anything but violin, guitar and drums. And I don’t really expose myself to a lot of that sound. I wonder if that happens to other people.
When I get a song in my head the rest of the time I only hear the vocals and rhythm and I don’t go through the whole song. Luckily I rarely have a chance to get a song in my head because I have music on all the time. Though today I was listening to the radio and singing a different song (If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake) at the same time which is annoying.
I notice a LOT that any rhythm I hear will perseverate like crazy and I will sit there wondering why I have this rhythm in my head and I’ll realize it was the tap dripping or the fridge made a series of noises.
On top of all that, I have ringing in my ears which I ignore but sometimes somehow it puts a rhythm in my head. Sometimes it gets louder and softer and all it really takes is three changes and that’s a rhythm that I will start to repeat over and over. Maybe that’s what keeps me from getting tinnitus though because it distracts me from the ringing. I spend a lot of time not paying attention to any of it because if I did it could make me nuts.
I forgot to make my point which was that if I try I can’t hear or recall a lot of instruments at once, but if I’m really relaxed it comes to me.
Oddly, I can ‘hear’ music perfectly accurately when I move my fingers as if playing it on the piano. Whether from memory or reading sheet music, even with a piece I’ve never heard before.
And when I ‘play a wrong note’ on my imaginary keyboard, I hear it wrong in my head. Very bizarre feedback …
Yes! This morning during the breakfast get up it was I Wanna Be Sedated, followed by a choppy rendition of Walking After Midnight.
I can replay the music of most songs in my head (sometimes with stereo separation ), though I’m not too keen on the lyrics most of the time since I mostly listen to the instrumentation in most songs anyway.
What I would like to know is if most people are able to mentally recall a song in the same key in which it was recorded. Since I have perfect pitch I always know what key a song is supposed to be in (e.g. “Stairway to Heaven” starts in the key of A minor). I would suspect that this is not necessarily the case with most people since perfect pitch seems to be a rare trait. Most people I know do not sing songs in the correct key if they are not singing along with the original tune.
It depends on how much I’ve listened to a particular song or cd. In high school I could play “Deluxe” by Better Than Ezra backwards and forwards in my head, not so much today. My internal jukebox has an annoying habit of finding something entirely innappropriate for my circumstances or getting stuck on something I loathe. In any case, I can definitely reproduce songs almost perfectly in my head. Like the people who add guitar parts and solos, I like to add vocal harmonies in my head. Then I try 'em out in my car later.
I “hear” music in my head very vividly, usually as a faithful reproduction of the first performance of the piece I heard. The first time I heard “Major Tom”, for example, was on a slightly scratchy single record, and I “hear” the characteristic hiss during silences in the song, especially just before the music actually starts. I don’t seem to have a track limit, either–I hear the whole piece, even if it’s an orchestral work. With complex works, I have trouble reproducing the melody vocally because I “hear” the piece as a gestalt, and it’s difficult to separate out any piece of it. I tend to start looping when I try. I can deliberately replay a lot of pieces, but there’s an even bigger stash of music where I can’t consciously access it. External triggers will bring out music I didn’t even know I remembered.
I think it significant that when I “hear” vocals in my head, I don’t necessarily understand the words. The sound of the words is perfectly clear, but there’s no meaning attached to them until I learn them separately from the music. I believe my very first question on the boards was about this phenomenon.
I’m the opposite - I’m a born singer (albeit lacking any particular talent at it), and most of my head tunes are very singing-oriented. An interesting tidbit - I’ve got “No Te Ames” by Jennifer Lopez and Mark Anthony in my head at the moment; the whole song is in Spanish, and I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m obviously enjoying a phonetic memory.
Me too. The only frustrating thing is that if I don’t know the words to the song, then I don’t “hear” them as clearly as other songs. The music is always cd-clear though.
My brain sometimes invents its own mashups too. “Destroy Everything You Touch” by Ladytron and “The Usual Unusuals” by the Gunshys didn’t sound too bad together…
My favorite is songs when there is some sort of breakdown, no matter how hardcore. Modest Mouse is amazing at this. So there I’ll be, somewhere formal or otherwise, just listening away at mind music. Then, the break down occurs… and just as I would if I was listening to it in real time, I often begin to dance, drum, or go crazy to the tune. You know, break it down.
If you ever see a man by himself dancing frantically in the corner, that’s me. You should wave.
I iPoded several Beatles DVDS. I played them so often, I can hear them clearly in order of play. :eek:
I can often hear a song in it’s entirety in my head, correctly; proper tempo, all the instruments (even if I don’t necessarily know what they are, I get the sounds correct), and all that good stuff. However, if I get distracted (and this is frequent and easy to do), I get the “loop” thing going on. I find myself singing the same verse over and over again, or hearing only one part of the song. Also, I get bored easily, so sometimes I’ll snip out parts of the song I think are too long or have lost my attention (ie: the whole end of the Eels song “Trouble With Dreams” bores me to tears. I only like the singing parts. I’ll cut the entire end of the song off after those bell sounds stop, and go onto some other song… then again, listening to the song on my iPod, I tend to do the same thing manually. 
)
Sometimes, as in my example above, I only like certain parts of a song, and since my head is my own personal radio, I get to play that part over and over as obsessively as I like without pushing buttons or annoying other people in my vicinity… that is, unless I’ve decided to hum it or sing it aloud. I’ve been driving my husband nutty lately, with my singing, over and over again: “Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks!”
Also, like featherlou, I tend to enjoy some songs in my head that are not in a language I am familiar with. I listen to a lot of J-Pop. Though I can wrap my lips around the words with relative ease because of knowing the song well enough, I don’t have a clue what I’m saying. I pulled the same stunt when I fell in love (briefly) with that Las Ketchup song a few years ago, “Asereje”, was it called? I couldn’t spell you the chorus, but by god, I knew it. I still know it. What are they saying? Damned if I know. A-sara-hey! Ha! De hey! De habi to dey hey bury say bee noahva mahavee an de boogie an de bweedeedeepee! 