If I hear it, is it real?
If your ears see, And your eyes hear, Not a doubt you’ll cherish — How naturally the rain drips From the eyes!
—BUJUTSU SOSHO
The more audio gear I review, the more fascinated I become by the fact that as I listen to recorded music, I can close my eyes and see musicians on the stage at Carnegie Hall, or djembe drummers in a desert by a tent, or a bass note penetrating the Milky Way. What a gift of consciousness. And what a great hobby it is that focuses my attentions in this manner.
Similarly, I’m amazed that in a silent room, I can close my eyes and see the Ramones on stage at CBGB—and hear them play, at what feels like full volume!
Wilder still: My composer friends tell me they can hear a musical score in their head while they’re reading it on paper. The best I can do along those lines is hear my own voice as I read my own writing. Plus, I have a playlist of songs stored in my head that I can play on demand. I maintain this jukebox in my mind so I can choose my own earworms. I never gave these diverse phenomena much thought until recently, when I learned that our interior experience of these sounds does not appear to be metaphorical—nor, as I had assumed, immaterial. Brain scans have revealed that brainwave-wise, the music we hear in our heads is not really different than what comes in from the outside. According to cognitive neuroscientist Robert J. Zatorre, when we hear a song in our head, our brain’s auditory cortex responds as it would if we were hearing it through our ears.1
Presumably, my ability to form these internal auditory images results from some type of primal cognitive process animated by complex webs of memories and associations, rooted somehow in the nature of harmonicity, wavelengths of Likewise, I imagine my brain is using the same deep-imagining powers—the same perceptual matrixes—that my forebears used to make flutes and drums and songs.
