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when you hear something, how do you see it in your head?

I associate a color/emotion to a track.

I kind of see it as a vertical moving eq. new sound comes from the right, higher frequencies on top. wobbles look like sine waves going across. drum hits look like a step sequencer.
i see individual sounds like on a normal horizontal eq

I find it kind of interesting
also once when I was tripping at bassnectar my mind was associating every little sound with a parameter or something and I saw them moving up and down like they were being automated, and it wasn't really random they were kinda spot on. I just wish I could remember what each was for

I don't visualize it, I feel it.

I visualize a bull rampaging a wooden area of flies. whoop.

i emote... im not that visual a thinker, maybe
i just study the lyrics if there are, and let it roll if its just music
looking at whats around me or close my eyes
tbh all i've been listening to is Mozart
it calms me down a lot

I just kind of feel/hear whats right. intuition makes up for my lack of theory

cool thread!

when i listen to music i lose myself in it. finals week last week, i realized i work at about a tenth efficiency when listening to music, it's awful, but wonderful at the same time. i think about all the different elements going on around me, what it would do to a dance floor if it's dance music, sometimes it'll remind me of a past experience, but most of the time i'm thinking about synths, and what went into making that sound. i'm always trying to visualize what each effect is doing, erm some examples would be grimblee's tones, his synths always have this like analogue gritty fucking tone that i've only come close to recreating. last week i was sitting in the campus center on my laptop and it was very busy there, things going on everywhere you look and some beautiful women and I put this tune on (I had headphones on)
Soundcloud
and i ended up ignoring my homework and everything else around me, i stared upward, and wished it was more socially acceptable to have my eyes closed. i was honestly so immersed in it i didn't care what went on around me. i dunno i feel like emotion had a lot to do with it, like i felt connected to the tune and the feeling it was meant to evoke.

..cool story bro.

i visualize what it would look like in FL, automations and everything...

is that bad?

I visualise music using windows media player.

Color & texture... Reverb "looks like" cold air...

hard to explain. geometric shapes, from right to left, moving up and down, but also with depth as an axis. sometimes the axis shifts and it's like i am the needle head and hte sounds race towards and past me

a 2d vertical space where your head is in the middle, instruments are kinda blobs or streaks depending on the stereo separation or detune, volume determines opacity, panning determines horizontal placement and pitch / feel determines vertical placement. so wide pads would faintly glaze over at the top, and sub bass would be a dot below your head. colour does not come into it.

a lot of interesting responses here. do you guys think the different ways we visualize it affects our perception of it differently? and maybe even the way we produce it?

shut up chad

i kind of visualize music as different objects moving around within the soundstage. kind of odd, but it makes things interesting

waveshapes (leads n shit) of some color.

With This

Color's the strongest single visual response for me, sorted by frequency: sub-bass and silence black, higher bass blue/purple, mids red, mid-highs orange, highs yellow, highest frequencies (e.g. hats) white. Noise is gray because it's a more or less uniform mix of frequencies; the more resonant a noise signal is toward a given frequency, the more saturated the color corresponding to that frequency range. Currently I like near-monochrome, mostly-black music with little flecks of color the best, hence a lot of Demdike Stare, Andy Stott, and T++ lately. Too much color, not my cup of tea. That's a relatively recent development. Also I guess the envelopes of sounds correspond to sharp vs. fuzzy shapes or gradients, not really well-defined. The frequencies tend to sit vertically from low to high like in a piano roll, so like the perc in an otherwise just-sub-bass tune will be little white or gray dabs or shards near the top of an otherwise black field. Now I sort of want to try drawing or painting this out.

Great thread, really interesting to read everyone's answers.