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

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.

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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.