Musical Recall: Do You Hear Music Playing Internally In Your Head?

Either some or most of the time, haven't actually tried to keep track, but it's very common. For example at the moment I opened this thread I realized I had a little snatch of the 4th movement of Beethoven's 5th and that same part had been going through my head for at least ten minutes. Lately I have often had Bowie's Modern Love or one of the tracks from Blackstar going through my head for much of the day. Occasionally I also get "original" stuff stuck in my head, like a little melody or rhythm or chord progression that occurs to me.

About 30% of days, I wake up with a song in my head that my subconscious has created. It's most often a tune, sometimes its a song fragment, and sometimes it's a whole finished work.

I rarely get to write them down, and even if I did I'm not in the position to do anything with them anymore.

At this moment in time, I don't have a tune playing in the background, but there are times where I do. So, that's the last but one option.

Most or all of the time.

I take on my surroundings unfortunately, which is fine on a woodland path near but bad in an office with a colleague that plays Katy Perry and Calvin Harris. First I suffer while it is happening, and then after being bludgeoned and hammered with this stuff for 6 and 7 hours at a time,....a moments peace on the walk home along the canal, and....'LAST FRIDAY NIGHT'

So, I guess I qualify as a musician, and I do have an internal music some of the time (not always mine own music - I was working through that Dylan 18CD thing that I got a nice DVD off ebay for, and up till yesterday I had "She's your lover now" driving me almost as mad as Dylan clearly was by the 10th take )

all the time for as long as I can remember. it's usually some variant of music I'm listening to or is top of mind (today "the man who sold the world"), but also tunes I conjure up subconsciously. Also, it often becomes a theme and variations thing, where after a while, my mind will start adding to the melody and extending it, looping parts of it. Never thought it was weird, just a combination of love of music and OCD/restless mind.

ha Branwell, was this from max tundra?

when i get insufficient sleep i wake up with a song looping in my head and it usually takes me several minutes to realize it

Yeah, it was from Max Tundra, haha.

But it's just... I don't know many people who *don't* experience some variant of this. Lots of people who are not musicians at all (but mostly people who are very into music, or for whom music is very important.)

I think maybe that's the way round I mean. That if you don't have a particularly sticky memory with regards to music, you're unlikely to become obsessed with it in the way that music obsessives or musicians are. But having this kind of memory (right down to really persistent details) is not a sign of ~musical genius~ or whatever. It's just a particular kind of recall.

all the time. either the last thing i heard, something random, or something i'm trying to write or work on.

the most annoying is when i'm hearing a melody or phrase that i know is from some recording, but can't place it because i'm hearing it with the wrong instrumentation.

Most or all of the time. I am not a musician (outside of my own mind).

I tend to get a tiny, isolated fragment (not just instrumental, sometimes fragments of vocals, too) but just not enough to connect it to What It Is. And it goes round and round until I'm somehow able to take it off "loop" and progress to a more recognisable bit and the chorus comes in, and "oh, of course, it was... all along!"

A reasonable amount of time.

A sub-question: how much do you hear music as-it-is-in-the-world in your head? Like, when I hear music it is mostly a vocal line or a bah-da-bah approximation of a line. I don't tend to hear instrumentation at all, solely rhythm and melody (or a funny noise). Can others hear in their heads full symphonic orchestration?

Always, so much so that I barely notice most of the time. If I'm not be able to identify what's "playing" in my head though, I find it quite annoying. Sometimes I'll get a loop of some noise or feedback or something that's hard to remember where it's from and I'll drive myself mad trying to think of where it came from.

If I know a piece well, I get everything - full instrumentation, arrangement, even crowd noise, (sometimes tape hiss or vinyl crackle, depending on what format I got to know it through) everything. If it's a piece I've only heard once or twice, I'll get the distinctive line (not always the vocals - that scratchy noise from Jack Ü is currently in there right now) and a bah-da-bah approximation where my brain fills in the stuff I don't know.

there's music in my head if a song gets stuck there, which is rarely these days.

frankly to hear music all the time in my head would be hell. i'm a musician and between listening and playing i love silence and will take it wherever i can get it.

It may just be a sign of the (historically) enormous amount of time a modern person spends listening to music.

A sub-question: how much do you hear music as-it-is-in-the-world in your head? Like, when I hear music it is mostly a vocal line or a bah-da-bah approximation of a line. I don't tend to hear instrumentation at all, solely rhythm and melody (or a funny noise). Can others hear in their heads full symphonic orchestration?

almost feel like i need to meditate on this. it's not as if i remember a song and it has all the tracks and full production, but it's not like i just remember a vocal line. probably has to do with memory/nostalgia more than anything. i think it's more a general impression, a combination of real sounds and emotions that come together a form an amorphous memory that you can't nail down to any constituent parts

Yeah I can usually hear the different instrumental parts, orchestration etc. The more I've listened to it the more clarity I'll get on the different parts.

different instrumental/vocal parts I mean.

I don't know that I could break it down into its constituent parts and say for sure that I'm "hearing" everything that's happening in a piece of music, but I do often "hear" music in the exact same way that I actually hear it when it's playing. My memory wrt music is fantastic compared to my memory in many other more practical arenas.

And that's with music specifically. I'm often atrocious when it comes to remembering lyrics.

I'm a musician but I'm a bad musician - I can't sing at all, I struggle with identifying intervals, I can't work out other people's songs, and although I can usually play in key if forced to 'jam' I worry intensely about it. So possibly my relatively poorly-rounded musical recall has something to do with this. I do tend to work best with rhythms, noises and conceptual work.

Oh, but now that I think about it, my brain is actually very good at improvising alternate instrumental tracks if my memory of, say, a guitar solo is fuzzy. I'm sure I'd be a dynamite musician if I ever bothered to, y'know, learn how to play an instrument or whatever. Probably make a pretty great billionaire, too. Someday, someday.

Probably most of the time. Yes, most of the time.

Yep, often. Can be songs I've heard or, for example, if I'm cycling, I'll be breathing with a certain rhythm and a melody will appear out of the rhythm and I'll have some imaginary tune playing in my head without realising it.

Hi Ralf!

yes, most of the time

Constantly.

at full detail too, assuming i've heard the song at least half a dozen times

the brain is a pretty crazy thing

even so, it's a poor substitute for actually listening to the song. kind of akin to smelling food vs tasting food

most or all of the time, and basically as far back as I can remember

I've often noticed that hearing a word or phrase will subconsciously and instantly trigger some associated song containing that word or phrase

I agree with the op inasmuch as I thought this was just a thing most people did inside their heads. The responses itt seem to back that up (unless ILX is an abnormal sample set, which is certainly possible).

I don't believe people when they say that this doesn't happen to them, if I'm being honest

When I hear things in my head, whether they are actual songs or not, tend to be full-fledged songs, fully arranged (regardless of whether they are pop music, dance music or choral music; I don't normally get purely orchestral music stuck in my head outside of movie themes)

I do wonder if I'd have got different responses if I'd posted this on ILE.

is this different from internal narrator voice?

Constantly

even so, it's a poor substitute for actually listening to the song. kind of akin to smelling food vs tasting food

when i was writing music, yes, absolutely. it didn't happen all the time, though. some were new melodies that i ended up recording.

I've often noticed that hearing a word or phrase will subconsciously and instantly trigger some associated song containing that word or phrase

― Οὖτις, Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:08 AM (3 hours ago

this happens to me a lot, though a significant portion of the time it won't be the actual word or phrase of the song, but it will be something phonetically similar, or with a similar rhythm (see that other thread with all the differently-lyriced Girlfriend in a Coma posts and Whiney's Fujiya Miyagi Kokomo post) ... like "avocado" will get "Anaconda" by Nicki Minaj stuck in my head 85% of the time.

is there a correlation between people with noisy heads being more inclined towards internally visualising as well?

used to have music in my head most of the time; now just "sometimes", mostly in the mornings, which disappears once I'm either busy or listening to real not-in-head music (which admittedly it's now possible to spend most of my life doing, unlike when I was a teenager in pre-ipod being-polite-to-parents-and-teachers world)

I am not a musician and don't think I have a very "sticky" brain for music in that I can often listen to albums several times and be left with no idea what they sounded like, sometimes I can't bring the tune of a favourite old song to mind, etc. I have a feeling I'm worse than average at internal visualisation too

I tend to get a tiny, isolated fragment (not just instrumental, sometimes fragments of vocals, too) but just not enough to connect it to What It Is. And it goes round and round until I'm somehow able to take it off "loop" and progress to a more recognisable bit and the chorus comes in, and "oh, of course, it was... all along!"

I get this a lot too, except the fragment often is the recognisable/chorus bit and it's just in such vague/fragmentary shape I still don't know what it is, e.g. a vocal fragment but with the wrong words or just a vague sense of the shape of the words, or I'm not even sure if I'm remembering it in the right style, etc. I don't get much instrumentation, mainly just the top line or a synthy squiggle

this might be a bit too tangential but I always wondered how musicians could change their mental track and start on the next song, I'd still be too stuck on the one I'd just finished to remember how the next one went. I'm not sure if this is having not enough music-sticky-brain or too much

Yeah, I get this "fragment of tune I don't recognize stuck in my head" all the time, and like Spacecadet, a lot of the time I can't recognize it either, because it's just a riff or something, and because I listen to a lot of instrumental music (techno, jazz, classical), it's not like I get lyrics attached to it that I could google.

In general I have music in my head all the time. I'm not musician, but I guess it comes from having been a music geek for 20+ years.

some

i saw this glenn gould piano video where he abruptly got up and went to the window still grooving to the piece in his head. then he went back and continued playing -- it looked pretty intense and kind of exhausting -- i dunno if that's the same kind of experience as finding yourself mentally whistling bridge over the river kwai while washing dishes. i'm guessing brian wilson's brain is more like the former?

all the time. I don't remember last time music wasn't playing in my head. when left to my own devices I have a tendency to hum or whistle or sing nonsense. the only way to stop it is to actually listen to some music. I don't mind though.

I get songs stuck in my head several times a week, sometimes on rare occasions for a month or months. This quarter: Grimes' "Realiti." A memory will trigger a song, or a song will trigger a memory. I'll hear music played on strings or piano that I can't identify and might be original but have no interest in working out b/c I play no instruments except clarinet and I haven't tried to play "Want You to Want Me" on it.

fwiw, just to show we do exist, I'm one of the "Not really + occasional earworm" people (and not even slightly a musician, like utterly anti-gifted in that way)

(also not a visualiser. I don't know what goes on inside here. Words, I guess, and arguing with myself)

Hear music much of the time. Wish I was a better musician/had a better ear so I could mentally play back melodies and chord changes that I heard at a concert.

I'm pretty sure I've had at least part of "Going Way Back" by Just-Ice pass through my head nearly every day for the past 20 year

I've had "Defiant Pose" by The Cortinas - a 1977 3rd Division UK punk single of minimal merit, that I taped off the radio and played no more than a few times - buzzing round my brain at random intervals for the past 38 years.

Said it before, but hearing one nano second of "God Gave Rock 'n' Roll to Me", or merely hearing it mentioned, means I'm plagued with it for the rest of the day. There goes my evening.

i get this, but it's kind of weird - i particularly seem to get this if i'm in a car and the window is open and you get that dense draft noise - it makes me sort of able to "play" music i am familiar with in my mind. i am not in cars on long journeys often these days but yday i was coming back from a funeral in ireland and i was reminded of this. i know it sounds weird and i don't know why it happens in this context - possibly boredom, we went on a lot of long journeys as a kid and i can remember first noticing this when walkman would run out.

i can't really do it at will though, and the window noise seems to be an important part of it.

on other occasions other sort of ambient city noises or whatever have made me hear a piece of music, and not just because they sound similar. i spent a few weeks in a religious commune type place in france in my teens and the noise in between the bell chimes was this weird grinding that used to kind of hit some part of my brain that wanted to hear music, the same few songs as well, probably lol teen indie but it was weird.

(not really the same thing, but ever since learning to hear the speed of records for djing, if i am listening to music in earphones and i hear another noise, it can be music, like in a shop or something, or just the whirring of a bus engine, my brain starts telling my hand to spin the record on or slow it down, like it needs the two noises to be in sync)

Those who hear music all the time: is it usually stuff you heard or do you also compose stuff in your head? I really wish there was a way to plug my head into a machine and upload compositions. It's not stuff I've thought hard about. A lot of the time it's just random melodies or rhythms that have been hanging around for years or decades and always seem to pop up, with no obvious origin to speak of.

Also wondering what fills that capacity for people who don't have music floating around in their heads, like whether they have bits of speech just rolling around in there, or maths or whatever.

i have bits of speech floating around all the time. quotes from movies. glengarry glenross is stuck in my head constantly. also lines from poems that i've never heard anyone read out loud. memories of friends saying something, images of their face when they said it. with movies or tv show stuff i often find myself having to google it and scratch the itch, same as a song i suppose. i guess this is really common.

p much every day when i "go to lunch" or anyone says "i'm going to lunch" i just hear the below clip in my head. i'm going to watch it 20 times now tbh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2PtsSKE4mY

haha, I had to youtube the bit in Friday last night where Ice Cube's dad goes 'THAT's MY PLEA-SURE!', but I don't think it's quite the same thing.

Those who hear music all the time: is it usually stuff you heard or do you also compose stuff in your head?

Both, but the latter instances are generally so juvenile as to not be worth mentioning (e.g. the song I composed in the shower this morning, entitled 'Bathroom Problems').

oh yeah, for me it's often gibberish that for some reason cracks me up. a form of, i dunno release or something. it's like sometimes i have to walk around the house singing childish nonsense for hours on end and my O/H despairs and just has to endure it. when i went back home at christmas i realised this was a familial trait my brothers and sisters had all inherited from my dad.

idk where i fall on this spectrum but before i picked up a musical instrument, i would hear parts in my head that i would like to hear in the song. now that i can reproduce those thoughts as actual sounds, it's very satisfying and i hear the song as i previously could only hear it in my head. i think this is why people play music? i've always had a good memory for music but never did much of anything with it til recently.

I think an interesting question (to me at least) is: can you do this at will, or is it only a reflexive / response phenomenon (the ear worm / "stuck in your head" phenomenon)? Can you control it? If I said "mentally play the bassline from Sloop John" could you dial up that song in your head, listen to it and reproduce the bassline? (I pick that song because it has a really distinctive bassline but feel free to try with something else you haven't heard in a while.)

The music is running 24/7, usually in concert with whatever I'm listening to but sometimes I'll be listening to/singing one thing and thinking another. With all that, I can usually change the song in my head at will.

i wake up most mornings with a totally random song playing in my head and i will also often have multiple tracks going at different times. Most of the time it's controllable, sometimes it's deafening and bad.

there are definitely times where it is not controllable and a song will stay stuck in my head for days. On at least a couple of occasions in my life it was bad enough that it prevented me from falling sleeping.

that should be "from falling asleep"

Jump They Say by David Bowie is now playing in my head and it has been frequently playing ever since I did a relisten of a bunch of his albums following his death. I'm slowly starting to hate this great song.

long ago when i was in rotc for a year, we once had to stand at attention for an hour while dude came around for 'inspection' of everyone. i played all of dark side of the moon in my head while waiting. iirc it was sometimes hard to keep from skipping ahead during instrumental passages -- the lyrics help keep one in place

i could not do that today with anything near that length, i'm sure

Also, it often becomes a theme and variations thing, where after a while, my mind will start adding to the melody and extending it, looping parts of it

i get this too, especially when i'm falling asleep, when it feels like these long meandering melodies are stretching out forever. but for me too it's not very rich, mostly melody, little textural layering. even when it's stuff i know well it can feel like it's just one thing at a time, like, here's some singing okay now the guitar's the main bit for a couple of seconds okay now back to the singing, etc etc. but i feel that gets more complex when i'm falling asleep too. i'm definitely at my highest level of musical ability when in a hypnagogic state.

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what does reading this quoted bit make your brain do?

there's some good stuff in the oliver sacks book musicophilia on this. some ppl think our brains are constantly producing music which you may or may not be able to tap into. there's a curious bit about a (rumoured) brain injury shostakovich suffered after being hit by shrapnel in the siege of leningrad

Shostakovich, however, was reluctant to have the metal removed and no wonder. Since the fragment had been there, he said, each time he leaned his head to one side he could hear music. His head was filled with melodies - different each time - which he then made us of when composing. Moving his head back level immediately stopped the music.

I need to read musicophillia again. I think that book may have influenced my thoughts on how common "music on the brain" is

I found that book really interesting, but all the talk of seizures and tumours made me feel really uncomfortable. I read far enough to know about the 'tape machines' theory he had.

Frustratingly I've had Jess Glynne's 'Don't Be So Hard On Yourself' stuck in my head all weekend.

long ago when i was in rotc for a year, we once had to stand at attention for an hour while dude came around for 'inspection' of everyone. i played all of dark side of the moon in my head while waiting. iirc it was sometimes hard to keep from skipping ahead during instrumental passages -- the lyrics help keep one in place

I used to do the same thing with the Beach Boys' 'Smile' bootleg while I was doing menial temp work as a student.

Some songs I can recall specific bits of if prompted, but more often than not it's random-ish chunks of things that I've heard recently. Yassassin, right now, which I've not played today but did listen to yesterday. I can't switch it on or off on demand, as it where, but I can pay attention / go with it, or else try and ignore it.

Constantly. A lot of times these days just abstracted riffs and melodies from stuff I'd listen to in the recent or not-so-recent past, sometimes which I dare to try to sculpt into songs if my I wn. I have decent recall too, though not with lyrics necessarily...

Constantly. A lot of times these days just abstracted riffs and melodies from stuff I'd listen to in the recent or not-so-recent past, sometimes which I dare to try to sculpt into songs *of my own. I have decent recall too, though not with lyrics necessarily...

i keep getting the same posts going round and round in my head

Is there musique concrète all around or is it in my head?

Now that would be something, going around with Pierre Schaeffer in your head all day

I totally get non-musical sounds which are repeated stuck in my head. Car alarms (there's one that cycles through a program of repeating sounds that was very common in NYC when I was young) - "please stand clear of the door" announcements. The particular buzz of the fan in the server room of where I used to work.

"Hit the North" is currently doing the rounds in my brain

there is a direct, 100% money-back guarantee that when i am hung over one of my least favorite songs, hitherto lurking undiscovered in the recycling bin of my brain, will leap unbidden into instant, remorseless rotation

Yes, all of the time...I am a musician.

Not only music but lyrics as well...to the point of whenever a friend sees me on the street they think I'm talking to myself (when in fact i'm signing a lyrics...)

"Leave me alone, I'm singing a lyrics"

signing a lyrics

"Yours Sincerely.."

I compose in my head - best way is while walking, because your footsteps already provide a beat (or at least time signature metronome to play off of). admittedly this means you're usually within a certain bpm range - I mean I don't suddenly go all slo-mo to create downtempo tracks. could make for a funny sketch though.

Ha, misread it!

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If the internal radio goes dead for too long it approaches that sinking feeling in the post-apocalyptic movie when Sparks fails to detect any signal or receive an answer to those that he has beamed out.

This phenomenon started when I was fairly young with video game music. As a result I have had some Megaman and Castlevania melodies stuck in my head forever and they often pop up in between whatever recent thing had wormed its way in there.

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

Lol

I don't know if we just have a seriously non-representative slice of the population (which is inherent in posting it to a board called "I Love Music" - maybe posting it to ILE would have got a different response) or if the original estimate was just bad and wrong, but still. LOL is right.

Yeah, we're a very self-selecting sample.

To summarise my previous ramble, I used to nearly all the time (things I'd heard, possibly-new compositions)

despite some attempts at transcription and some rushing straight home to my guitar/sequencer, I never successfully captured any of the "new" head-music to turn it into actual music, but the possibility that one day I might do so made me feel special all the same, I guess

so it would really enrage me whenever some jackass near me would hum or whistle or w/e: how dare you, you have detuned my musical radio with your inane mouth-noises, I suppose you also think you are special, and that your specialness is greater than anyone else's so we should all like to hear your mouth-noises instead of our head-music radio! perhaps you have deprived the universe of the amazing new symphony I might have created from this tiny neural glitch! (I was a pompous teenager)

now I only sometimes have music in my head and only ever other people's songs, but I still feel that now completely irrational (as opposed to only 99% irrational) rage when someone hums or whistles near me

I do think people are also interpreting this question in a variety of ways, and ways that probably don't tally with Brian Wilson's experience. For instance, it talks about his hearing voices in his head. There are multiple ways I can see to interpret this. One, he recalls bits of conversation and TV shows, thus "hearing" those "voices". Two, he thinks in words and sentences inside his own head, creating a "voice" inside there. Three, that inner "voice" is more of a running commentary on his life, less controllable but still "him". Four, he hears unwelcome intrusive other voices that nobody else can hear, and over which he has no control, they are not in any way him.

I suspect that his experience falls very much toward the latter camp, both in terms of voices and music, whereas even when we say "yes, all the time", we probably mean more like the earlier conditions. Not everybody, of course! And I'm also not claiming that the former are "sane" and the latter "mad". Just trying to lay out where I see possible differences in interpretation.

(sorry for overuse of quotation marks, it seemed necessary for clarity, but may just be annoying.)

That's about right.

My memory of the article was him describing a panic attack as "hearing voices" where normally he heard only music. Hearing voices was unusual; normally it was a background of internal radio.