I often, instead of listening to music, just read the notation. It’s a purer experience than hearing it, though I do enjoy the auditory experience as well- it’s just that this auditory experience is a small part of a much larger experience of music that embraces all of my senses at once, my entire nervous system and physiology. I have a rarer variant of synesthesia which, instead of just, for example, causing a person to “see” sounds, connects all of my senses: I “see” the music, but I also feel each chord with its own weight, each harmony like a block with its own size and shape, etc. I see it, have a tactile response by feeling its weight, it has shapes and sizes, etc.
You’ll notice that all the links pair the music with either a visualization or, if that isn’t available on Youtube, just the sheet music. I do this to approximate synesthesia, which I have. Music to me is only incidentally an auditory phenomenon. Music itself is pure form, pure information, pure pattern, pure… When I observe the stars and the motions of the planet, or I see ripples on the face of water,- all of those things, to me, are music. When I compose, I see the pure structures in my head as sort of blocks fitting together, each block with a different feeling, a tactile response like it had a unique weight, each has its own shape and size and they just fit together like legos in my mind’s eye. Then I write the music down. And these blocks fit together, not merely into frozen architecture as Goethe called it, but machinery- the blocks form together into these animated… machines, I don’t know what else to call them. It takes work to get these machines to activate, to fit together and become alive and start doing whatever they are doing or are supposed to do. If you remove the wrong block, the machine stops moving around, it becomes dead, de-activated like a robot you took the battery out of… You put the right blocks in the right place and boom, it becomes alive again and starts moving around, like an engine or something. Because of this, I hold each of my compositions in my mind’s eye as though they were unique machines, each one “does” something, some of them move, some turn really fast in a circle like an engine, some undulate, folding into and out of themselves, pulsating; each of these machines is very different, each operates a certain way… I can disassemble and reassemble them in my head; sometimes I can take a part out of one and plug it into another and it does something weird or cool, which might become the basis of a whole new composition. I try to interconnect all of these machines in my head to create one giant machine; it would be amazing to connect them all together to sort of, I don’t know, unify the entirety of my mental contents into one “thing”… I would also say that I experience my prose, my ideation, my philosophy in this exact same way: music and prose to me are the same thing, it’s these blocks and interconnective machines I get from my synesthesia. There is no difference at all, to me, between writing music and writing prose. This type of synesthesia- I am trying to explain what it’s like but it’s hard to do. This is about the best I can do with describing the experience.
If you’ve ever used DMT and seen the strange self-transforming machine things that characterize the experience: it’s that, these block-machines I am trying to describe. I believe DMT causes you to have, briefly, this kind of synesthesia.