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

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.

Every time I read or hear the word recall I think of the scene in Total Recall where the jackhammering dude shouts "RECALL! RECALL!" at Arnold. "They'll fuck with your head!". I might be conflating two separate scenes.

All the time. It's like I internalized music from all through my life and my brain's on shuffle, playing it back.

Or something like that.

"leave in silence" by depeche mode has been playing in my head all day, even after listening to joan jett and def leppard to/from work.

Yes, some of the time. Usually random fragments of songs I've listened to recently, but sometimes one song will stick around for days--I've had Rickie Lee Jones "Danny's All Star Joint" rolling through my head all week.

More so than that, there's a constant stream-of-consciousness monologue running through my head that surfaces when I'm sleepy and my concentration wanders (e.g., at work all day long). In just a couple of seconds of mind drift, whatever I was thinking about turns to dream-logic gibberish, and when I come back into focus, I'm left with maybe the last half of a nonsensical sentence.

I keep a document open on my computer so I can write them down. Since 2011, I've got well over 3000 of them. Here's a random sampling:

In Wolf's mayonnaise already
There's, like, murderers and planes in there
Spec second six a lot
I got paid in Chihuahuas
Brutally cold in front of the egg
You know I'm a slumberhorn
The Travel Rights Movement
Herring brawl
Don't a sackbut
Get your hands undirty
He's too cute to be a data orange
Bite a balloon on a bus and cry

I think I need to start a Twitter feed.

I constantly have a song stuck in my head--there's not a free moment from it but as I musician I really don't mind.

I remember once in high school some of my friends in a different english class though it would be fun to write down every thought that passed through their heads and compare notes after class. I decided I would join in but at the end of the class I didn't have anything because the only thing that went through my head the entire time (other than processing what the teacher was saying) was Janelle Monae's "Mushrooms and Roses".

Hell I even have other music playing in my head while listening to music a lot of the time (but this is mainly when listening to music for the first time or seeing unfamiliar bands live)

this is 100% of the time for me though it's only a nuisance if i'm tired, and i also thought it happened to everyone else 100% of the time

I sometimes work out difficult arrangements/dense productions by leaving them to play in my head. It's kinda weird hearing things in more detail like that than I can off the recording, tbh

Or I'll work them out bc I can isolate parts in my head more easily as they're "playing"? I dunno, it's odd to think abt properly

Almost all of the time. And most of the time they aren't song I like but songs I hear repeatedly, i.e. ones that are played at work a lot or ones the radio play regularly.

I fucking hate it.

Thinking about this, re: the stickiness of music, and revulsion to enforced public music. I really cannot stand piped-in music; have gone so far as to quit jobs where there is radio or non-chosen music playing all day. It irritates me way way more than it seems to irritate other people, partly because I am unable to tune it out, but also because repeated exposure to music jams it into my internal radio.

If I'm so "sticky-eared" that someone simply saying something can get a song lodged on my internal radio, having radio I cannot control playing all day long is close to torture. That can get very invasive and intrusive.

I have come to the awareness that wearing headphones 80% of the time I'm out of the house is actually a form of protection, on many levels. This is only one of them.

the best bit about the film Inside Out is the recurring gag about he chewing gum ad music that keeps popping into the girl's head.

Feels like all the time pretty much. Woke up and fell asleep with Susanne Sundfør's Fade Away in my head every single day for at least a month last year to the point where it got a bit Groundhog Day freaky. Marina & The Diamonds I'm A Ruin for past couple of days due to revisiting for the poll.

I've genuinely never thought about this, I think I just assumed everyone had a song stuck in their head for their entire waking lives.

I know yr gonna groan and call bullshit, but the one track that really comes to mind when I think about internal soundtracks is "Kristallo" Kraftwerk, b-side of "Comet Melody 2"

"Chakka bom cha, chakka bom cha, ..."

Can others hear in their heads full symphonic orchestration?

Also kinda intrigued by how many parts people can hear in their head, I also get that muffled resolution thing. I also know a guy who can keep an entire multi-part classical or choral piece in his head and then notate it with a ridiculous degree of accuracy, I wonder if that's a prodigious display of the same ability or something else entirely.

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.

Wouldn't hearing only one part be harder? (Equivalent of isolating track)

definitely have this most of the time

it is also weird to me to think that some people don't get songs stuck in their head, that is hard for me to imagine

I think it depends partly on what people pay attention to while listening (for instance, some people may only pay attention to the vocal line, and not to the rest of the arrangement) and partly just for specific different kinds of recall.

This is something I was tested on, in music classes, so I'm aware that parts of my recall (the ability to recall a tune; the ability to recall intervals, which is the fundamental building block of harmonies) are quite accurate, while others (the ability to recall specific rhythmic patterns) I just don't have as good facility in.

It's interesting, now that everything in the universe is on the internet, to call up a commercial on YouTube that I haven't seen in 30 years and confirm that the jingle that randomly and spontaneously just played in my head is exactly what I recall hearing as a kid. That's the most clear-cut example of stickiness I can think of, recalling with precision something that I know with certainty I haven't heard in decades.

I've had "Let's Dance" in my head - in some kind of cut-up and rearranged loop - for a few days now, I think, on and off. Before that it was another song. Voted 'some of the time' but it's 'some to most' really, I think. Kind of assumed everyone did to some extent, but then I think about Emma's dad, who just doesn't really get music at all, and conclude that everyone's different really.

Long solitary bike rides often see me getting a tiny fragment of a song in my head, often a song I don't even like, and just looping around and around and around.

On bike rides there's usually a lot of environmental noise -- do you also hear other songs while listening to music concretey stuff?

most of the time (jean genie the last few days), and most of the time i don't mind

but sometimes i get a snippet of one song that then leads inexorably to a snippet from another song, and they loop back and forth in my head and i go insane

almost all the time for me. I am not and have never been a musician.

Currently, a Piper at the Gates of Dawn track. Can't remember the name.

The other day I listened to Faith No More's Angel Dust for the first time in maybe 10 years and I realized that a song fragment which had been showing up intermittently in my head for years came from that album.

Every time someone itt mentions a song or album I know, it instantly starts playing in my head.

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.

Ha, misread it!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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.