Comment by xlii
10 hours ago
I have aphantasia in both visual and audio forms. And I can tell you audio aphantasia is wild.
I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it.
Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't remember my own compositions. They usually come back to me as a play on hands and not on audio.
I thought I was music deaf for the most of my life. My music teachers mocked me in my youth showing me as an example of someone with zero hearing.
My latest music teacher discovered that I actually have absolute hearing skill but... can't recall sound in my head. So I sense even slight shift in toning (e.g. given few variations of same melody I can tell which one is the original tuning) but I can't reproduce it.
I think i have this too (also play piano, have perfect pitch). I have an excellent musical memory, but i have to actually play a song / sing it out loud to hear it if that makes sense.
I do have the motion-centric imagination sense (i could "feel" what it would be like to do a layup) without physically moving.
No ability to generate audio, visuals, etc "on the inside".
Do you have an internal voice?
You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!
There's been some great research into aphantasia in the last ~5 years - worth reading about if you have aphantasia.
Very cool