Hearing music that isnt there

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Yes. Whenever I hear this large fan I start to hear a song from a game. And sometimes when I think about a song when I'm trying to fall asleep I can sometimes hear it a little.

I do occasionally get this. In my case, it's because I am on a car journey and the engine noise turns into music in my head. It's associated with being half asleep so that the logical side of my brain is turned off. It's quite pleasant.

I occasionally had a similar effect on train journeys, when half-heard conversations almost made random poetry in my mind. For this to work, I have to be in a half-dreaming state and not really listening. If I focus on making sense of a single conversation my brain doesn't do it.

People who want to know about this stuff could read Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia. He became interested in the subject after meeting some elderly stroke victims who suffered from what he described as attacks of incontinent music. They tended to get this in quiet situations at night. It could be thoroughly aversive, loud and oppressive band music when the sufferer has never liked band music and is trying to sleep. In another case, it was long-forgotten lullabies from the patient's childhood, giving her a sense of the comfort of her mother's care.

Like 'hearing voices', 'phantom music' is good, bad or neutral depending on the person in question and their reaction. It's just a brain trick, and doesn't have much intrinsic significance.

unless I'm listening to it in my head, not that much as of recent, but I did used to hear what sounded like high-pitched frequencies a lot back when I was a kid when it was generally very quiet all around.

I'd completely forgotten about that until this discussion; and thanks, now I hear it again.

It happens to me fairly often. Now I use my head like an MP3 player if I don't have a computer. I've tried making my own tunes instead of the videogame music I normally get, but I can't keep those in my head long enough.

I do this to an extent. My mind tries to find patterns where there is no pattern, and just a tendency to a pattern will set it off, like a sound repeating itself. The same with random patterns I see, if they are just a bit clustered I start seeing things in them, mostly animals. This behavior is much more intense when my brain is in high speed. When I was really depressed I actually stopped connecting the dots in real music and just heard it as random noise.

I have music running through my head all the time - sometimes other people's, sometimes my own - but then I'm a musician anyway so I don't consider it all that unusual.

Did have a laughable episode fifteen or so years back when I bought a CD by the ambient/industrial duo Main. The final track ("Thirst") is around 20 minutes long - I put it on and slipped into a rather, erm, medicated stupor on my bed. It wasn't until after nearly an hour that I realised the CD had long since ended and I'd been listening to the washing machine churning away in the kitchen for the last half hour or so.

Maan.. LOL!

That reminds me of a friend I had, she was really into earlyish industrial music where they used all kinds of non-instruments to play on.

We walked through Copenhagen and passing some guy drilling a hole in the asphalt. And I say Great solo isn't it? !st she looked like laughing and next moment like she was going to hit me in the face.