Sound Association Quotes

Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.

The way it works for me is my sight and sound senses are combined. Every sound I associate with a color and every color I associate with a sound... The way I see things is constant streamers across the room, bouncing off from every touch and every sound. Over the years, I've learned what color palates I love most.

I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.

Music is a gestalt. Songs are a life force and they have specific vocabulary to them. You hear a few notes, and they take you into a world of association.

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.

The word "down," is very musical. It just always comes.

I compose with bells a lot. Bells and breath. Both things you react to without thinking about it. Bells traditionally give us orders: come to the desk, the truck is backing up, the ice cream is here, it's time to go to church. They're sounds our brains are already associated with.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes, or dark lake with the treble.

There are certain sounds that have a loaded past. Like the sound of a harp, if you go back to old movies, represents a dream sequence; it transports you there.

A riff can take on the aspect of a chorus in a listener's psyche.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.

Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me - the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.

I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.