My singing teacher can imagine polyphony and doesn’t seem crazy. My opera singer friend can imagine vocal lines complete with manner, and doesn’t seem crazy either. It seems to be a pretty standard ability of trained musicians.
Wait—there are people who can’t do this? How do they get ear-worms? If you imagine Boris Karlof singing “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch”, and the voice in your head doesn’t sound like Boris Karlof, what does it sound like? How can you do a Ronald Reagan impression if you can’t hear what Ronald Reagan sounds like in your head?
I get terrible, terrible ear-worms. I once heard parts of the first 2 movements of Beethoven’s 5th nonstop for almost a week.
I’ve introspected about this a lot—yes, introspection bad—trying to figure out how many parts I can hear at once. At first I thought I could hear 3 to 4 parts at once (4 only when the song was very familiar or the parts were very different). But I can’t hear even 2 parts begin at precisely the same moment. It seems to require very rapid, barely-perceptible, attentional switching between parts, on the order of tens of milliseconds, to change the note.
Mozart could reproduce complex polyphony after hearing it once, so he must have been able to hear and imagine all the parts. Although I’m sure he had very good compression and predictive accuracy to help him reconstruct it.
If you imagine Boris Karlof singing “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch”, and the voice in your head doesn’t sound like Boris Karlof, what does it sound like?
It doesn’t sound like anything.
If that seems odd to you, imagine a triangle.
No, really, do it. I’ll wait.
Now: what color was that triangle? How many centimeters across was the base? Was it a solid, or a line enclosing an area, and if the latter how thick was the line? Did it have a matte finish, or glossy? Was it opaque, transparent, or translucent? If opaque, did it cast a shadow? Where was the light source, and how tall was the triangle, and what was the color of the light… for example, was the shadow cool or warm?
Most people’s imagined triangles simply won’t have those visual properties, even though triangles they actually see do have those properties, because imagination isn’t a matter of re-presenting things to our visual systems. It’s something else, though it has aspects of that.
In much the same way, when I imagine a song, it doesn’t sound like anything… it simply doesn’t have those acoustic properties.
Or, well, that’s my default state. I’ve trained (mostly for my own entertainment) to where imagined songs have various acoustic properties for me if I pay close attention to providing them, but typically they don’t.
So this is a few months later but I decided to respond anyways because 1) I had answers to many of your questions when I pictured a triangle and 2) my name is also David and “TheOtherDavid” is a name I frequently use online. How’s that for typical mind?
Anyways, without even realizing I had done so, when I pictured my triangle, it was: solid, red-orange, matte, opaque, and it had no shadow. As triangles go, that particular form means nothing to me that I am aware of (it’s not, for example, a sign I see at work on a regular basis or anything like that) it just happened to be what I imaged. For whatever it may be worth, I read “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch” et al in the appropriate voices in my head, but am unable to produce music or other specific sounds that I am aware of.
Similar to this type of thing, though, I experience fiction almost as a movie both as I am reading it and in retrospect. Even just after I have read a page, I will have no recollection of any of the particular words used to describe the scene, but will be able to recount everything that just happened in detail. It wasn’t until I met my wife in the beginning of my time at college that I realized this wasn’t how everyone experienced books.
Now: what color was that triangle? How many centimeters across was the base? Was it a solid, or a line enclosing an area, and if the latter how thick was the line? Did it have a matte finish, or glossy? Was it opaque, transparent, or translucent? If opaque, did it cast a shadow? Where was the light source, and how tall was the triangle, and what was the color of the light… for example, was the shadow cool or warm?
Most people’s imagined triangles simply won’t have those visual properties, even though triangles they actually see do have those properties, because imagination isn’t a matter of re-presenting things to our visual systems. It’s something else, though it has aspects of that.
You might be generalizing from one example. There are plenty of games asking people to imagine (say) a cube, then asking them about various properties of the cube, and then purporting to relate them to features of the subject’s personality, and I can recall very few people answering “I don’t know” to any such question.
I’m confident I’m not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I’m overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I’m not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted—rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it’s socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.
“Very few” /= “none.” People seem to vary widely in their visualization abilities. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that they could vary in their auditory imagination, but now that TheOtherDave reports his experience, I feel like I should have expected it.
Some of us are devoid of all mental imagery, not just visual, but in all sensory modes. It’s awfully quiet in my mind! I’ve never heard a peep, not the sound of a voice—my own or anyone else’s --, no music, nada. No ear-worms possible. I can’t imagine Boris Karloff doing anything, because I can’t imagine Boris Karloff! I can’t hear what Ronald Reagan, or anyone else, sounds like. Auditory imagery sounds like a mighty fine superpower that I would like to have!
Seems like some people don’t get them (incidentally, I’d never heard the term ear-worm used for it before now—I always thought of that as song-stuck-in-my head—yours is a good succinct term for it). I get them, though. Songs don’t get stuck in my head too often, however, and I find I can easily make them go away by playing a few songs on a radio or mp3 player that are different from the song that’s stuck there.
I addition, most of the time I can control the auditory channel in my thoughts, so I can use this to listen to songs I feel like hearing, and change these as desired. I can also use this to listen to other people’s voices in my head, or to waves on an ocean beach, etc. I don’t get perfect fidelity of remembered songs, but I can get both instrumentals and vocals. The lower the fidelity of the remembered song, the more the vocals sound like me(if I were a much better singer doing a passable karaoke of it).
Incidentally, why would introspection be bad? As an introvert, I desire large amounts of introspection. In addition, I think that understanding one’s self is essential for knowing what one really wants in life, which in turn is essential for creating plans that will maximize your satisfaction of life. Some examples of this would be choosing the best major for yourself in college, choosing what employment you will seek, and choosing your overall approach to life. I feel this is always one part understanding myself and one part understanding the world.
That’s anecdotal evidence; if it’s that usual, there should be a better study. How many people do you know that have hallucinations? Is not knowing people who can imagine hearing sounds but don’t hallucinate any indication that there is as little risk of developing hallucinations in these people as in the rest of the population? What is the absolute risk with/without aural imagination? At most, you may place an upper confidence bound on the absolute risk, like 10%, which is not that good for deciding to jump off the roof. Also: “imagine” allows too much ambiguity, I was talking about hearing in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from actually hearing (hence the worry).
I was talking about hearing in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from actually hearing (hence the worry).
Ahh, I see. I’ve never really experienced this; I can always tell the difference between imagined sounds and real ones. Note that this is entirely different from the phenomenon of misinterpreting real sounds as being something else (especially very soft ones), which is completely harmless.
To add more anecdotal evidence, I also “hear sounds” in my head that relate to music. I can catch myself actually processing these as audio which seems similar to your statement of actually hearing songs in your head. As soon as I notice it, it will go away.
The real example, however, is that I took an intro from a folk song and made it my ring tone. I hear that thing everywhere even when my phone is not ringing. I have no idea why. If I think, “was that my phone?” I start hearing the song.
Wow, you are blessed. When I hear sounds in my head, whether remembered or imagined, I feel as though I literally hear them. They are not merely background noise… on some days all of the music in my head gets so loud I just can’t think straight and I have to find a way to silence my inner world. When I hear a melody, even in isolation, I hear full harmonization in my mind, which is why if I start singing along with a friend I have to work at sticking to the melody and not expressing the accompanying harmonies I hear in my mind. Because hearing them so vividly while knowing the sensory sells in my choclea are not vibrating accordingly is sometimes frustrating, thus by creating phsyical expressions of the sounds I hear in my mind, I reconcile my external reality and my internal reality. All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
That is actually pretty cool. Are you a musician/composer in any form? If not...I think you could be without too much effort. I would love to have the ability to sing harmony on the spot...I know the theory well enough to write harmonized parts, but not in real-time because it’s not intuitive to me. And when I have a song in my head, it’s usually just the main vocal line my attention can hold. With a LOT of effort I can “hear” chords or two parts in counterpoint, but I have to work hard at it.
All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
I can imagine hearing imagined sounds like you do, maybe because it’s something I wish I could do...although you find it annoying, so maybe I should revise my expectations. I do know that up until about age 11, when I was completely tone-deaf, I had almost no ability to hold a tune in my head...”songs” stuck in my head consisted of the lyrics, in rhythm, but in a sort of monotone. Which is how I would then sing them, which is why everyone said I was tone deaf.
Is this related to the phenomenon where if I play on a Gameboy for a long time, I start hearing its music constantly (usually identifying it as someone else playing the same game on theirs)?
Possibly. It certainly seems related, but I have no real idea. It seems a little more like processing long-distance repetition after the source has stopped. Hearing my ring tone may be more of an association between the thought “I wonder if I am going to miss a call” and hearing the ring tone. My experience backs this up: I only hear the ring tone if my phone is within earshot and I am doing something that causes me to miss calls (driving, taking a shower).
While we are talking about auditory randomness, when I listen to a large amount of music in a day and the next day listen to none, I have the songs from the previous day stuck in my head but in reverse-chronological order. The song I played at the end of day 1 is in my head at the beginning of day 2 and as the day progresses I move backward up my playlist. Has anyone else ever noticed this?
The song I played at the end of day 1 is in my head at the beginning of day 2 and as the day progresses I move backward up my playlist. Has anyone else ever noticed this?
Here we report that sequential replay occurs in the rat hippocampus during awake periods immediately after spatial experience. This replay has a unique form, in which recent episodes of spatial experience are replayed in a temporally reversed order. This replay is suggestive of a role in the evaluation of event sequences in the manner of reinforcement learning models. We propose that such replay might constitute a general mechanism of learning and memory.
My singing teacher can imagine polyphony and doesn’t seem crazy. My opera singer friend can imagine vocal lines complete with manner, and doesn’t seem crazy either. It seems to be a pretty standard ability of trained musicians.
Wait—there are people who can’t do this? How do they get ear-worms? If you imagine Boris Karlof singing “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch”, and the voice in your head doesn’t sound like Boris Karlof, what does it sound like? How can you do a Ronald Reagan impression if you can’t hear what Ronald Reagan sounds like in your head?
I get terrible, terrible ear-worms. I once heard parts of the first 2 movements of Beethoven’s 5th nonstop for almost a week.
I’ve introspected about this a lot—yes, introspection bad—trying to figure out how many parts I can hear at once. At first I thought I could hear 3 to 4 parts at once (4 only when the song was very familiar or the parts were very different). But I can’t hear even 2 parts begin at precisely the same moment. It seems to require very rapid, barely-perceptible, attentional switching between parts, on the order of tens of milliseconds, to change the note.
Mozart could reproduce complex polyphony after hearing it once, so he must have been able to hear and imagine all the parts. Although I’m sure he had very good compression and predictive accuracy to help him reconstruct it.
It doesn’t sound like anything.
If that seems odd to you, imagine a triangle.
No, really, do it. I’ll wait.
Now: what color was that triangle? How many centimeters across was the base? Was it a solid, or a line enclosing an area, and if the latter how thick was the line? Did it have a matte finish, or glossy? Was it opaque, transparent, or translucent? If opaque, did it cast a shadow? Where was the light source, and how tall was the triangle, and what was the color of the light… for example, was the shadow cool or warm?
Most people’s imagined triangles simply won’t have those visual properties, even though triangles they actually see do have those properties, because imagination isn’t a matter of re-presenting things to our visual systems. It’s something else, though it has aspects of that.
In much the same way, when I imagine a song, it doesn’t sound like anything… it simply doesn’t have those acoustic properties.
Or, well, that’s my default state. I’ve trained (mostly for my own entertainment) to where imagined songs have various acoustic properties for me if I pay close attention to providing them, but typically they don’t.
So this is a few months later but I decided to respond anyways because 1) I had answers to many of your questions when I pictured a triangle and 2) my name is also David and “TheOtherDavid” is a name I frequently use online. How’s that for typical mind?
Anyways, without even realizing I had done so, when I pictured my triangle, it was: solid, red-orange, matte, opaque, and it had no shadow. As triangles go, that particular form means nothing to me that I am aware of (it’s not, for example, a sign I see at work on a regular basis or anything like that) it just happened to be what I imaged. For whatever it may be worth, I read “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch” et al in the appropriate voices in my head, but am unable to produce music or other specific sounds that I am aware of.
Similar to this type of thing, though, I experience fiction almost as a movie both as I am reading it and in retrospect. Even just after I have read a page, I will have no recollection of any of the particular words used to describe the scene, but will be able to recount everything that just happened in detail. It wasn’t until I met my wife in the beginning of my time at college that I realized this wasn’t how everyone experienced books.
You might be generalizing from one example. There are plenty of games asking people to imagine (say) a cube, then asking them about various properties of the cube, and then purporting to relate them to features of the subject’s personality, and I can recall very few people answering “I don’t know” to any such question.
I’m confident I’m not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I’m overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I’m not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted—rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it’s socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.
“Very few” /= “none.” People seem to vary widely in their visualization abilities. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that they could vary in their auditory imagination, but now that TheOtherDave reports his experience, I feel like I should have expected it.
Some of us are devoid of all mental imagery, not just visual, but in all sensory modes. It’s awfully quiet in my mind! I’ve never heard a peep, not the sound of a voice—my own or anyone else’s --, no music, nada. No ear-worms possible. I can’t imagine Boris Karloff doing anything, because I can’t imagine Boris Karloff! I can’t hear what Ronald Reagan, or anyone else, sounds like. Auditory imagery sounds like a mighty fine superpower that I would like to have!
Hi, Phil .
Seems like some people don’t get them (incidentally, I’d never heard the term ear-worm used for it before now—I always thought of that as song-stuck-in-my head—yours is a good succinct term for it). I get them, though. Songs don’t get stuck in my head too often, however, and I find I can easily make them go away by playing a few songs on a radio or mp3 player that are different from the song that’s stuck there.
I addition, most of the time I can control the auditory channel in my thoughts, so I can use this to listen to songs I feel like hearing, and change these as desired. I can also use this to listen to other people’s voices in my head, or to waves on an ocean beach, etc. I don’t get perfect fidelity of remembered songs, but I can get both instrumentals and vocals. The lower the fidelity of the remembered song, the more the vocals sound like me(if I were a much better singer doing a passable karaoke of it).
Incidentally, why would introspection be bad? As an introvert, I desire large amounts of introspection. In addition, I think that understanding one’s self is essential for knowing what one really wants in life, which in turn is essential for creating plans that will maximize your satisfaction of life. Some examples of this would be choosing the best major for yourself in college, choosing what employment you will seek, and choosing your overall approach to life. I feel this is always one part understanding myself and one part understanding the world.
That’s anecdotal evidence; if it’s that usual, there should be a better study. How many people do you know that have hallucinations? Is not knowing people who can imagine hearing sounds but don’t hallucinate any indication that there is as little risk of developing hallucinations in these people as in the rest of the population? What is the absolute risk with/without aural imagination? At most, you may place an upper confidence bound on the absolute risk, like 10%, which is not that good for deciding to jump off the roof. Also: “imagine” allows too much ambiguity, I was talking about hearing in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from actually hearing (hence the worry).
Ahh, I see. I’ve never really experienced this; I can always tell the difference between imagined sounds and real ones. Note that this is entirely different from the phenomenon of misinterpreting real sounds as being something else (especially very soft ones), which is completely harmless.
To add more anecdotal evidence, I also “hear sounds” in my head that relate to music. I can catch myself actually processing these as audio which seems similar to your statement of actually hearing songs in your head. As soon as I notice it, it will go away.
The real example, however, is that I took an intro from a folk song and made it my ring tone. I hear that thing everywhere even when my phone is not ringing. I have no idea why. If I think, “was that my phone?” I start hearing the song.
Personally, I find it annoying, but not harmful.
“As soon as I notice it, it will go away.”
Wow, you are blessed. When I hear sounds in my head, whether remembered or imagined, I feel as though I literally hear them. They are not merely background noise… on some days all of the music in my head gets so loud I just can’t think straight and I have to find a way to silence my inner world. When I hear a melody, even in isolation, I hear full harmonization in my mind, which is why if I start singing along with a friend I have to work at sticking to the melody and not expressing the accompanying harmonies I hear in my mind. Because hearing them so vividly while knowing the sensory sells in my choclea are not vibrating accordingly is sometimes frustrating, thus by creating phsyical expressions of the sounds I hear in my mind, I reconcile my external reality and my internal reality. All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
That is actually pretty cool. Are you a musician/composer in any form? If not...I think you could be without too much effort. I would love to have the ability to sing harmony on the spot...I know the theory well enough to write harmonized parts, but not in real-time because it’s not intuitive to me. And when I have a song in my head, it’s usually just the main vocal line my attention can hold. With a LOT of effort I can “hear” chords or two parts in counterpoint, but I have to work hard at it.
I can imagine hearing imagined sounds like you do, maybe because it’s something I wish I could do...although you find it annoying, so maybe I should revise my expectations. I do know that up until about age 11, when I was completely tone-deaf, I had almost no ability to hold a tune in my head...”songs” stuck in my head consisted of the lyrics, in rhythm, but in a sort of monotone. Which is how I would then sing them, which is why everyone said I was tone deaf.
Is this related to the phenomenon where if I play on a Gameboy for a long time, I start hearing its music constantly (usually identifying it as someone else playing the same game on theirs)?
Possibly. It certainly seems related, but I have no real idea. It seems a little more like processing long-distance repetition after the source has stopped. Hearing my ring tone may be more of an association between the thought “I wonder if I am going to miss a call” and hearing the ring tone. My experience backs this up: I only hear the ring tone if my phone is within earshot and I am doing something that causes me to miss calls (driving, taking a shower).
While we are talking about auditory randomness, when I listen to a large amount of music in a day and the next day listen to none, I have the songs from the previous day stuck in my head but in reverse-chronological order. The song I played at the end of day 1 is in my head at the beginning of day 2 and as the day progresses I move backward up my playlist. Has anyone else ever noticed this?
Related: Reverse replay of behavioral sequences in hippocampal place cells during the awake state (LiveScience, Nature News and Views)
I can’t relate … that sounds weird. I’ll certainly lower my expectations as to how other people’s experience is like mine.
I’m reminded of the Tetris Effect.