Imaginary Music
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about how the mind processes music. I’ve read a few interesting books that have helped me to understand perception and consciousness and the firing of neurons. I’m still a long way from really grasping all of this enough to make useful connections to what I’m doing.
However recently I had an interesting thought that I think could help to focus all of this:
The auditory image as the engine of music composition.
To explain what I mean by that, it useful to think about visual images in your mind - your “mind’s eye”. Scientists have studied this for a long time and still don’t totally understand it, but they can generally agree on a few things, for example:
- Producing mental images uses a lot of the same brain machinery involved in actually seeing something.
- Mental images are fleeting and elusive, and their vividness varies from person to person.
- Visualising something is mentally similar to anticipating what you are about to see.
Interesting stuff, but the idea of auditory images is comparatively neglected. One can assume that it’s a pretty similar process, except auditory rather than visual… well that’s what I’m assuming anyway.
If it is, then it makes a lot of sense that composition is largely about the ability to imagine sounds that aren’t actually present in the environment, and then produce them accurately. A basic example is when musicians are jamming together, and one might hear an appropriate melody in their mind, then translate it to their instrument, adding it to the arrangement. We can read a score and silently imagine what it will sound like, we can come up with new melodies while on the bus, and sometimes we get songs trapped infuriatingly in our heads.
It seems to me that this ability to imagine music is essential for both the composition and appreciation of music. For composers, being able to have a clear and vivid image of something that doesn’t already exist in sound is definitely an advantage. These days computers make it possible to compose by trial and error, but I think this still isn’t enough to replace the mental ability to imagine a novel new line or texture. Perhaps being a “good” composer is a combination of a vivid and agile auditory imagination, and the skill to accurately transform this into sonic reality.
When it comes to listening to & appreciating music, I think auditory images play a significant role here too. The effectiveness of music is often related to its ability to play on our expectations. The brain calls up visual images to anticipate actual vision, and perhaps auditory images work in the same way. Perhaps the reason why a syncopated rhythm works is because we expect to hear a sound on the beat, and by expecting it, our minds actually hear it. But the surprise comes when it isn’t there - it’s somewhere else.
It’s interesting to think about the relationship between visual & auditory images. For example, while the radio is playing, if someone asks you how the Star Wars theme goes, it’s difficult to bring it to mind. We need to plug our ears or turn the radio off before we can do it. Seems obvious enough, but if someone asks us to visualise Darth Vader’s face while we are looking at a painting in a gallery, we have no difficulty. We could probably even mentally insert it into the painting in front of us just for shits & giggles.
It’s an interesting contrast here that might either suggest that auditory images are less vivid and readily retrieved than their visual counterparts, or it could simply mean that when it comes to music, we are only able to track one stream at a time. It’s possible that this problem is less about auditory imaging, and more about how the brain deals with music specifically (considering the brain processes “music” & “sound” differently).
Moving back to the Star Wars theme problem: you are sitting there trying to remember how this familiar tune goes, and if it so happens that you are a trained musician, you are probably at an advantage. You may have heard the tune before and visualised the beginning of the tune as three triplets on the dominant moving to a strong tonic chord on the downbeat. Or you might have visualised it using some other non-traditional notation system. You might have played it once on guitar, so you can visualise which frets you used. In any case, using this visual information is really helpful in forcing a tune back into our memories.
I wonder why this happens. Again we could argue that it is due to the visual imaging faculties being stronger, as we were unable to hear the Star Wars theme in our mind until there was some way that we could also see it. But perhaps it’s more complicated than that.
There are a lot of questions here - perhaps more questions than answers - which make it an interesting topic for further investigation. Despite the uncertainties, I feel that the idea of imagining music is important, so I’m gonna keep thinking about it. Stay tuned.