How people with AS interpret music

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I said this elsewhere, but I started off seeing/feeling/(being?) music for a long time when I was younger. I don't necessarily see music visually - I dunno - I can't explain the thoughts it produces, but I know I find it almost to be "emotion-substitute". Certainly when I'm low, I'll setup my keyboard to play as a string orchestra, and just improvise away - it's like stress relief.

Drugs taught me more about perception of music - now I sort of hear it from everywhere. When I can, I listen loud enough, or with inner ear headphones, that I feel like im "in" the sound, not just hearing it. I dunno - I can't describe it, but based on my curious abilities at recognising pitch, harmonics and tone instinctually, and being able to read them from a page, and hear them, I guess it's not how everyone does it.

An emotional point for a second though - I don't think there is anything more integral to the human soul, or any more accurate descriptor, than how it perceives music.

I can't really tell what instruments are playing in music, but when I listen to it I hear a certain mood based on how the music goes depending on the speed of the song, the singer's voice tones and the song's volume level. For me each "mood" is a different kind of physical landscape, weather, and social climate. All music creates its own world.
But, being an aspiring writer, and more the word type than anything else, I tend to focus mostly in on the lyrics, to which the actual backgrounds simply form a support: When I listen to music, I hear a story told out of chronological order in only small fragments at a time.

I love how so many of us have so many different ways of seeing the world, but what ties so many of us is we have a particular focus, or obsession that we excel in.

I don't know whether I have perfect pitch or tone, but music moves me like nothing else, and the ideas just seem to never stop, each time I finish a project, the next one comes, I feel like I'm simply an observer, doing what I can to get them done.

I see and feel music as well as hear it. Whenever I listen to music, particularly through headphones, I see the song as a space (the most common shapes I find in songs are deep cylindrical bowls, endless corridors, and spheres) and I'm inside it, nearly always floating. I don't see specific notes, but I'll see different parts and elements of the songs (sorry if this makes no sense to anyone else) as different colours and shapes. My favourite songs always have at least some turqoise and/or blue in them, and I rarely like yellow in songs. One song in particular that's amazing to experience for me is "Sanctuary" by Hikaru Utada, and when I hear that it appears to me as a very deep cylindrical bowl, with colours ranging from lilac to deep blue, and huge, intricately patterned lilac and blue diamond/kite shapes along the walls.

As for what I can hear in songs, I can distinguish instruments (although I couldn't until I started practising for my college course), but I can't understand the lyrics unless I really focus on them. I tend to focus more on the voice than the words, which at least means that I can listen to songs in any language without being bothered about the fact that I can't understand the lyrics.

Music, and all sounds for that matter, fill spaces. Just like light does and people or objects do. When I hear music it feels like it is surrounding me. It fills the room I'm in. I'm very sensitive to sounds. logically, if sounds fill spaces. I can feel I'm choking in a car with noisy people. It has to be only one making noise and I fel like there's no space left.

But I think I experience music highly 3D.

interesting repiles to this. I thought I was the only person who saw visual things while listening to music, but it seems like from these replies, I'm not the only one. For example, U2's "Streets with No Name" starts out, I see a sun rising. I can visualize myself traveling down a country road. the rhythm guitar reminds me of sunlight flashing through trees, fields, and other stuff as the vehicle travels by them...sort of ironic I guess because I picked up on that even before I noticed the beginning line says "I want to feel sunlight on my face" Of course, the visualitions in my mind change as to what is being played, and are hardly limited. "Subdivisions" by Rush sort of has visions of cars traveling on a highway in sort of a time-lapse speed, while "Blinded by the Light" has me visualizing of traveling in some sort of spacecraft accellerating through starfields and clouds of cosmic gases.

The thing is, I don't really enjoy listening to a particular song or a piece of music until these visualizations start. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a while. Some of the newer punk and alternative rock, although I can appreciate some of the musical creativity that goes into some of it, doesn't really peak my interest because I don't really obtain these visualizations easily from it.

I 've noticed that I am rarely a casual listener of music. I can't really have it playing while I'm doing something else, as it distracts me from that task, and I pay more attention to the music, or, If I direct my attention to the task at hand, the music ends up making things to chaotic for me. Instead, I prefer to listen to music without distraction, just sitting there listening. I also like to listen to music without any other audible distractions, like appliances running, etc. I can't really listen to much in an automobile because of this.

I am not a very emotional person, and rarely connect with people on an emotional level. Music however is my emotional connection. Although I don't really pick up on the lyrics directly, I can pick up on the tone of the music and the performer really conveys the emotional message to me very well...something I've noticed that NT's rarely pick up. What I find is odd is that NT's frequently pick up the lyrics right off in a song or piece of music, wereas I rarely do, BUT NT's don't pick up the emotional communication. I especially find this interesting because I rarely pick up the "hidden" meanings to spoken words like feelings and such, and percieve them very concrete without emotion. My percieption of music is the exact opposite of conversation!

Overall, I have a VERY sensitive ear to music. I can pick out instruments and tell what types of special effects they have on them and all sorts of stuff. I guess this is what makes me good as an audiovisual techie. An interesting talent I've picked up is being able to adjust and calibrate analogue audio gear like tape decks and record players just by listening to my favorite music. I can tell if the tempo is off because of speed issues, or if there's the slightest hint of wow and flutter (speed inconsistencies) or if there's an alignment problem reducing or changing the tone of the sound. Of course, at home, I must enjoy my music on a pretty much perfect high fidelity audio system!

I'm curious as to how NT's experience music. It seems like they are rarely as involved in it, and use it sort of as a "background noise" to add even more chaos to their ever busy world

I like to describe the way I hear and mix music as a "sphere of sound"

Meaning the bass towards the center, as you get higher end you spread it out, till you're left with a 3 dimensional "image" that can be seen different by almost every single person. Placement always interested me most in music, as well as structure, and the sheer scope of it.. While I'll always love a perfectly written song, my favourite music of all is that which breaks boundaries, redefining what music actually is.

In terms of what I create, I like to mess with the way I hear sound itself, my songs tend to f**k with aspects of rhythym, and melody, in way that I think only electronic music can. I call it "sculpting" the sphere of sound..

Anyway I always found it insane that I could feel such emotion from a song, and get such a clear point to what the artist is saying before I even understood the words, and I would show the same song to 5-10 people and the general consensus was that the music was egotistical, or about something very shallow, or "pointless semantics".

It made me realise each person is looking for something in particular in music, I for example love to be taken places I've never been before aurally, where as a LOT of people tend to only like music which fulfills expectations.

The whole point in it for me is to hear something that moves unlike anything before it, and therefore as I learn it, I learn aspects of myself. A lot of people sadly are simply looking for music to kill the time and support cultural norms.


Lot of us muso's on here, I'm thinking we should get together some sort of compilation album with a few tracks each... Anyone interested?

I don't care about the lyrics of songs, usually, unless they are demeaning.

I usually only like a song if I'm satisfied melodically by it. Probably why I like a few of Keane's songs so much. ^_^

For me sound and passion can usually convey more than sheer words alone.

A perfect example is "truth" by Devin Townsend, called such because its a place beyond words.

I tend to selectively interpret what I want to see in music (otherwise I would overload with information):

* If I want to identify patterns, I'll see a sequence much like a graph scrolling horizontally which instead of measuring notes, it measuring relative patterns by pitch. For example, if I hear a sequence with a A, B, C, A, B, C, I see a sawtooth pattern. The problem is that there's no scale measuring what the pitch of every note recognized, so I can't identify notes well with it, only the pattern of a series of notes. Sometimes I also see a predicted pattern in my mind before it actually happens too. So I could be listen to something the first time and predict the rest of the song.

* If I want to analyze the pitch and volume collectively of a instrument, I see a series of bars which the higher they go, the higher the volume and higher the pitch the instrument is. Sometimes I also see a acceptable standard comparison to it, and usually if both series of bars match, the song is perfectly flowing to my ears.

* If I want to see colors out of a song, I see almost a majestic cloud of colors similar to the one I see in fluid blending. The stronger the pitch, the more faster the color changes to whatever I interpret it as. If the mood or style of the song changes, the color changes completely.

* If I want letters out of a song, usually if I knew it's title, it's first letter is what I see throughout most of the song, however certain patterns or moods change the letter I see. Sometimes I see words or even gibberish too.

* If I want to let the song control my daydream, my mind will be able to cue a video scene to go with the music perfectly. It's usually if I need an idea or need to find music perfect for a game, story or multimedia project to use.

* When I don't selectively filter, I tend to see everything, including stuff I didn't mention above, such as memories, themes and what instruments I recognize, etc all in a randomization.

Despite these interpretations, I find it difficult to learn music in the proper fashion and can't play any instrument well.