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

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.