Comment by jacquesm

I can listen to music in my head. I don't think this is an extraordinary property but it is kind of neat. That hints at the fact that I somehow must have encoded this music. I can't imagine I'm storing the equivalent of a MIDI file, but I also can't imagine that I'm storing raw audio samples because there is just too much of it.

It seems to work for vocals as well, not just short samples but entire works. Of course that's what I think, but there is a pretty good chance they're not 'entire', but it's enough that it isn't just excerpts and if I was a good enough musician I could replicate what I remember.

Is there anybody that has a handle on how we store auditory content in our memories? Is it a higher level encoding or a lower level one? This capability is probably key in language development so it is not surprising that we should have the capability to encode (and replay) audio content, I'm just curious about how it works, what kind of accuracy is normally expected and how much of such storage we have.

Another interesting thing is that it is possible to search through it fairly rapidly to match a fragment heard to one that I've heard and stored before.