do you visualize music?

[Moksha]

Especiall DJs and producers:

What does music look like in your head while listening? Do all the individual instruments create different visual patterns, or is there just one overall image? Are color and texture involved? Could you draw it? Can you verbalize it? Can you create audible music from visualized music patterns?

Do we have things in common in our visualizations, or is it completely individual?

[ultra]

I experience this while designing for this industry.

I love putting a face on this music!

[ October 24, 2003, 10:35 AM: Message edited by: ultra ]

[drilla]

this may sound corny but i used ride the m60 bus across 125th street in harlem to get inspired to make hiphop beats...

it seemed whenever i rode through that part of town i got all of these ideas for beats...it would just come to me...

now, i sit on my roof and look at the city...that gets me inspired too...the scenes i see become music to me.

(im usually smoking herb while im on my roof too so that may have something to do with it ;) )

[GROOVE VICTIM]

It's a mixture of colors, like an abstract painting.

Depending on the pitch of a song, for example:
A record that's in F Sharp Minor, a dark image with a black background, patches of red and some yellow.

Anything in the Key of A Flat Major, B Flat Major, E Flat Major, usually a brighter background in blue, white images, yellow images,

These keys always conjure up memories from my past, mainly my childhood.

Songs in the key of C minor, usualy bring back images of my childhood during the early 1980s. Alot of it having to do with songs such as "I'm on love" by Evelyn Champaign King, and "So Fine" by Howard Johnson.

Songs in B Flat Major would remind me of the late 70s when Georgen Benson's "ON Broadway" was out.

Weird shit, but it keeps me going through the day.

Peace

[Leslie]

I visulalize my self dancing if I am really feeling what I am listening too.

[mdpm99]

Rainbows in me mind:

red/bass
blue/mid's
amber/high's

At the same time all the above 3 colors make up the entire spectrum.

d

smile.gif u can color me david if u wish.

Ps.

Colors......Chicago

[ October 24, 2003, 10:25 AM: Message edited by: david mancuso ]

[drilla]

Originally posted by Leslie:
I visulalize my self dancing if I am really feeling what I am listening too. i do this too!

[upliftdisco365]

Well, I don't actually see things, but songs occur to me in flashes. I typically write a song's lyrics in 10 to 15 minutes; it's as if it's almost writing itself. It still freaks me out a little. I don't hear a song idea as a bassline or a drum pattern, I hear the whole song; completed and just ready to put down. It's almost a visualization, but it's more like an epiphany that will stay, playing repeatedly in my head and bugging the shit out of me until I put it down. There've been songs constantly playing in my head for my entire life. It makes it really hard to concentrate on other stuff. Sometimes, I wish I could turn it off.

[ October 24, 2003, 10:31 AM: Message edited by: upliftdisco365 ]

[Moksha]

Groove and David,

I experience the same abstract visualizations when closing my eyes. . .though mine seem to be more specific. I am unable to verbalize them very well. . .but the texture (soft, velvet, smooth, rough, sharp, hard, etc.), color and mutating shapes are all dependent upon the instrumentation and feel of the music. The various tunings on a snare drum can conjur various visuals, etc.

Classical music tends to be the most vivid for me. Stringed instruments create very profound visions.

It is interesting to hear that others relate music to reallife visions.

So. . .I guess that it is an individual thing, and that our common cultural experience does not necessarily give us simialr visions.

I am still interested to hear if any producers, when composing music in their head, do so visually as well as audibly.

Is anyone familiar with McLuhan's theories on figure/ground, right brain/left brain, writing/music, pattern recognition/visual concentraion, rods/cones etc. theories?

[ October 24, 2003, 11:13 AM: Message edited by: Orion : Konbit ]

[GROOVE VICTIM]

Konbit, I understand you 100% when you say that you are not able to reproduce these images on paper sort to speak.

I have individual images for brass, woodwind, and string instruments. I just can't draw the image, and trying to describe the image to a person that can draw is like speaking another language.

A song such as "1984" by Van Halen is a perfect example for me when it comes to images flowing through my head.

Peace