Some people are able to do a lot more than that, once I was sitting on a plane next to a guy who turned out to be an orchestra conductor - he was silently reading an orchestra score like a book. I mean that was a dense score, some modern symphony for dozens of instruments, and the way he described it to me was he simply hears it in his mind just like if he listened to an orchestra recording. Most incredibly, he said he has never heard this particular music performed before!

That comes from training - you spend enough time hearing clarinets and violas and timpanis, and after a while you can imagine what new combinations sounds like. Traditional orchestral composition involves developing this practice (I speak from experience, having been trained as a composer and sat through these classes).

that anecdote fills me with an insatiable sense of envy.

I think these skills are to some degree learnable.

That orchestra conductor probably spent a large part of their life studying music. Part of learning music is ear training: the ability to name/write chords by hearing them, and conversely to "hear" them in one's imagination given the name (or from written music). No different than the way many people "hear" words in their head when reading.

They are, indeed, learnable. Even a mediocre amateur musician like myself learned to 'hear' the music when reading simple scores. Took a while though. But it's useful. I can look through score music and pick the ones I like, without having to actually play from the score first. Pros and orchestra conductors are on an entirely different level of course.

It's not that hard at all. After some years studying music as a kid I can read piano sheets. He with 10+ years of experience can definitely cope with much more complex ones.

Ha, don't feel bad. That skill is important for maybe less than a thousand people in the whole world to have. And it can be done with computer programs anyway.

Actually, this is not true. Find me a program that can extract the scores from a complex piece of music and attribute the right notes to the right instrument/voice. I haven't found one yet. But maybe that's because I am not versed in the music analysis software available. Never needed it. Now I think of it, it would be really handy for my job though. If you know of one, please let me know. Especially one that can analyse the music live and then transposes it to midi notes/OSC without a hefty lag.

Took me 5 seconds of Googling, first result: https://www.playscore.co/

There's Sibelius AudioScore http://www.sibelius.com/products/audioscore/ultimate.html

I haven't used it personally, but from what I heard a few years ago it wasn't very accurate.

Are you just asking for a software capable of playing the right notes from a written piece?

Well, composers, conductors and improvisers (e.g. jazz, folk) need to have it, so that would put it to several hundred thousands, not "less than a thousand".

Maybe, but I think improvisers wouldn’t even have to be able to read music at all. Just imagine sounds that go with the current tune and then play them. You don’t have to picture a score in your head to do that. Whenever I’ve jammed with other people that’s how it’s worked.

Yes, I think that is common to be able to replay music you've heard in your head. I feel confident this is another thing that is a spectrum, not binary. So some people just need to hear something once and have it perfectly, others need to hear it a lot and still don't remember it well.

My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.

I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory

> My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.

Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.

I sometimes have the experience that there is one word in a sentence that I did not get (often prompting me to say 'huh'), and that after some pondering, I suddenly get it and 'hear' the word being replayed in my head, and it suddenly becomes perfectly clear what word the person said (often prompting me to say 'okay').

Echoic memory is also very useful when someone says something, but you haven't understood them right away. There is also iconic memory, which stores the things you see and lasts less than a second.

I have echoic memory for audio, and that's indeed very useful.

But I don't have 'playback' memory for anything else, definitely not for visuals or touch. So if something is said around me and I didn't listen, I can replay the last couple of seconds or so, and that's usually enough. Helps with languages you're not fluent in too. But if I suddenly notice that I'm now touching something that I shouldn't, say, for example with my arm, in a crowded pub, there's just no way I can 'replay' history, not even the last moments, to figure out how that happened. Unless I actually paid attention when it happened. Same with visuals. If I didn't recognize what passed before my eyes there's no way to replay that to take a better look. Unlike with audio, where I can do precisely that.

It's cool to find that echoic memory has a name - the number of times it has saved my bacon in class when I'm not paying attention and the teacher asks me what they just said to call me out....

Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head?

Do you have verbal thoughts?

> I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged.

You are probably just neuroatypical. You should try to discover if your neuroatypicality gives you an edge over neurotypicals in some areas and exploit it.

You might enjoy reading experiences of someone who is neuroatypical in opposite way. "Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding". By Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

alternate link: http://web.archive.org/web/20170219035332/https://www.grandi...

>Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head?

>Do you have verbal thoughts?

Not the OP, but my mind's ear is deaf just as my mind's eye is blind. I can plan a discussion in my head. I don't really hear it, I just think of what word I'm going to use, in a similar fashion to how I can think of a sphere but not actually see it. I think more about the points I'm going to make sure to make, though, than the actual phrasing. When I'm practicing a speech or something, I can feel my jaw and mouth muscles trying to move, so I think I'm sub-vocalizing it or something. That realization makes me very careful around others when I'm having private thoughts.

When I'm thinking about a solution to a programming problem, or any problem really, I sometimes "disappear" for a while and when I come back I have an idea about how to best proceed. People have commented in the past about my becoming completely still and zoning out for a period of time.

The inside of my head is a pretty quiet place usually. I just noticed that my jaw was making the movements I would use were I to speak the end of that last sentence. Weird.

Interesting. In your daily activities, you cite your mind as 'clear' -- is it just of visual imagery/sounds, or in general? Do you 'feel' thoughts some other way? What is going on when you 'zone out' in your mind? Say for a programming problem, If you don't see code in your mind, do you still 'feel' it some other way?

Can you describe what you experience when recalling something?

For me, (it of course varies by the object of recall) it is most times imagery, although sometimes it can be emotions, sounds, etc. (I use the imagery as an 'address' after which other related memories are linked to and emerge).

I can't stop music from running in my head, as a background to the constant noise of my thoughts. They coexist.

It's interesting how different our experiences are. I do not think you are brain damaged, just specialized in a different way.

It's just as likely that you are the "brain damaged" one and he is the normal one. ;)

I like to imagine it as if we're all CPU's that has come out of a lab that organically grows them. But as a result of that they're all a little different.

Unfortunately sometimes they're heavily different with extra or missing depth in certain areas, which makes the generic software that we're trying to install on them struggle to adapt (in various different ways).

I try to avoid listening to the music. Because then it plays all the time in my head afterwards, especially when I'm a bit tired.

Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button. :)

It's super interesting how memory works. Like, I can remember the content of songs because they have rhyme and rhythm and pleasantness, but I can't remember anything else word-for-word. I'm the king of paraphrasing jokes and quotes, because I can never remember how they originally went.

edit to add: I'm just kidding about the brain damage thing, but seriously, I very much don't like the idea of presenting this as "aphantasia" as though it is a lack of something. I think it's (probably) just a different system that's optimized for different kinds of behaviors.

I do also suspect that the mental visualization could be learned. I feel like when I played Legos as a kid I was incidentally practicing my visualization, perhaps the only reason I'm good at it now is an aggregate of those kind of coincidences.

>Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button

hehe sure sounds like it :)

In my case, songs or melodies are nearly always playing. If I'm awake, chances are that something is on in my mind's radio. Conversation and writing seem to be the only activities that consistently quiet the music, though there are other times during the day when it's less noticeable.

This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.

I’m much the same. I think that’s part of the reason I’m quite a good musician and can play by ear really well. I can visualise auditory/musical things far more vividly than I can images, and correspondingly I find visual art quite difficult. I can still imagine images to a reasonable extent but I suspect that people who can draw and paint well probably can do it more to the extent I can hear music!

Interesting. I wonder if the musical practice led to the mental music. I am also a musician, but I'm not certain whether the mental music began before or after I started playing (I started playing more than ten years ago as a teen).

Wow. I don't have this, and I don't think I can.

I have an almost pathological hatred of silence on the outside - because when there is, there's also silence on the inside. Unless I actively think about a tune, or decide to hum or whistle a song, there's no radio. So I'll only hum/whistle or sing a few bars or a chorus and distract to thinking about something else.

So sitting in silence quickly becomes wearing. I have to keep thinking of stuff, and music, to fill it.

Now if I go fell walking or find myself in a forest or on a deserted beach, there's always enough sounds of nature that it doesn't feel silent. Not like a house, class or exam room or office can. It's only that which quickly gets oppressive.

You've never had an earworm?? E.g. where a song is stuck in your head and you can't get it out?

I can hear/imagine a human voice singing, (similar to the way my internal voice 'talks' when thinking) but i usually can't imagine instruments, because they always end up sounding as if they are performed by a human voice.

Several times i did listen the sound of instruments as if real, but it happened only before falling into sleep, and just thinking about that would wake me up enough to bring the human voice back.

Do you / have you ever played any instruments before? Maybe it's just case of associating something else with the sound the instrument makes - for example perhaps you need direct experience of producing say, a guitar sound, in order to associate the 'performance' of the act, with the actual sound it produces.

Interesting suggestion, I have tried to learn piano as a child, but only for a few months so didn't learn anything beyond several simple melodies.

> a song is stuck in your head and you can't get it out?

never. although that sounds like a blessing :)

As someone who is prone to earworms... I would be genuinely happy if I never had to experience them again. Not joking at all.

For anyone that remembers late 80s/early 90s hits/earworms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFuGRBAKM2I

> well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(

I see it more as tradeoffs that make us different. For example you may have noticed that you are better than average at folding paper in your head and other spatial tasks. You have your aphantasia to thank for that.