How many of you have vivid visual imagery? (& mental models of music)

In that case no is the ans but anthony braxton to thread!

But when I'm talking about having a model for music, it's not necessarily something that happens while you're listening to the music. It's more something you carry around with you.

If emotions are a way of modeling our values, and music is a way of modeling emotions, (two big ifs which many of you won't agree with, at least across the board), then our mental models of music are models of a model of a model. (Plato would not be happy.)

but thats only for Radiohead ;)

if the song has no video and the people behind it are faceless to me but i like the song i will make up a video to go with. this is one of the best pastimes in the world ever to do on your own that doesnt involve physical exertion altho it can get very frustrating when your idea for the video is so good but you cant really make it for real...or if your video is better than the one that does actually exist for the song - buh

my best friend does colours with music, but mine are much more like short films really. either memories, or how i would use them if i were making a film - not a video, but a film - either in terms of animation (trying to remember the name of the bloke from the GPO unit in the forties desperately. not coming to me) or in other forms. film means more to me than music does i guess, but nothing pisses me off more than badly placed or used music in a film. but something like louis malle's use of "minor swing" at the beginning of "lacombe lucien" manages to sum up to ME what i am thinking of when i hear reinhardt and grappelli play. i can't listen to any music without that stimulus. sorry. probably not being very lucid i guess...

i'll shut up now

Since then I always see these silvery shapes when I listen to drum machine music. They help me understand the spatialization in the music, what the filters are doing, how the pieces lock together, etc.

In fact, I can't imagine listening to techno without visualizing the sounds as shapes or colors or whatnot. I suppose you could picture a DJ rocking the crowd, but how could you keep from visualizing Jeff Mills in front of his computer in his pajamas, picking his nose while he contemplates his snare programming?

I think I agree with the model of a model part of this. I know when I'm looking through cds and deciding which one to play, I don't hear snippets from them in my head, but I have some other kind of personal identification of what the music on the album is like.
I've always been able to put 3D objects into my head & rotate and combine them with no problem, or pull up a painting or photograph I've seen, but I don't think that I relate that to music too much. It was more helpful when I was taking piano lessons- when I was memorizing a piece, I could kind of see- not hear- what was coming next in my head. So I had a shape of what the notes I had to play were which wasn't a music staff, but some abstract kind of shape that I couldn't really describe. If I'm just listening to something that doesn't happen, though.
It's damn impossible to describe thoughts like that in words, which makes this pretty difficult to write about. This is a great question, though. I'm surprised no one's yet been snarky & tbrought up the winamp style mp3 visualizers. (;

When the song is incredible it kind of trancends all the technical aspects of the music for me. When I hear bad idm I see the process behind the track and pick it apart, when I hear bad rock, I think of the band banging away in the studio using this guitar or that... Good music takes me away to some alternate world that is completely enveloping. I see a very beautiful art world where everything is so much deeper and more vivid than anything I encounter in daily life. It is a bit like Warhol said, movies always seem so much more real than life.

I think the reason I prefer electronic music to other musics is that I find it so much more visual and interesting. When I hear something like Tomorrow 01 by Jeff Mills or Minus by Rob Hood or certain tracks from Headphone Easyrider by Baby Ford I see these beautiful images of pure geometry. These georgeous sound worlds that have absolutely no bearing or counterpart in world. It is like taking the painting of Piet Mondrian or Op-Art and coverting it into evolving video. Ambient music is very Rothko to me. Different genre's seem to evoke different worlds and moods.

To me, music is very much painting in sound. Music is better than visual art to me because it is much more involving. When I am really listening to something and enjoying it, I am very much unaware of what is happening around me. It is like walking around in a good painting, but visual art always seems external to me. I am seeing something, I am watching something, but I am never in something. I think in many ways, the worlds that I see in music are more real to me than a lot of the physical places I have actually been to. SAWII by Aphex or Icon by Derrick May seem like real environments to me.