Aural Imagery Quotes

When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.

I feel like I can see the music and can see how the character of the music actually flows. For me, that's music to my eyes.

Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.

It's not like I see colours. It's just, for me, an incredibly strong association between music and colour.

Now, music almost feels naked in my mind.

People who think radio acting is easy are wrong, because you got nothing to work with but your voice.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

I see songs in colors; I see days of the week. Each day of the week I relate to a gender, and it's very weird. I can taste words sometimes. It's very strange.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.

I associate colors with music, or music with colors.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.

I always see colors when I listen to music. It's difficult to explain, but when I hear the music, I think about gold, blood rushing... I like to keep it really warm and glittery.

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.

When I write music, it's very strange: maybe it's normal, but I see things in songs in different colors.

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

If you listen to a score from beginning to end, you should envision the entire film in your head.

There were certain things in 'Nemo' - just this low hum of ocean and watery sound - that was enough to imply water, as opposed to restating it over and over again.

I love narrative videos, but sometimes I think they can limit a listener's experience of a song.

An auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments.

I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there's a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.