Auditory Imagery Quotes

I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'

I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running.

That's what's interesting: When you release an album, everyone hears it their own way.

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.

As they say of the blind, Sounds are the things I see.

For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.

Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

The way one perceives a book and a film are totally different. You read a book in the privacy of your room. You are the boss; you set the pace and rhythm of your reading. In the movie house, you can't do that.

'The Conversation' is one that, if you watch 'The Conversation' for the opening sequence, where you hear a conversation taking place as the master - this zoom from way up is zooming in over a park. And I was just absolutely blown away by it because you can hear exactly what's happening, but you don't see. You've got no idea who's talking.

I just always hear music in my head. I thought that was normal. My wife said, 'Ramin, that's not normal.'

The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.

I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind.

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.

What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.

Whenever I heard the song of a bird and the answering call of its mate, I could visualize the notes in scale, all built up within my consciousness as a natural symphony.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.