[aristophenes]

Yes, I think that is common to be able to replay music you've heard in your head. I feel confident this is another thing that is a spectrum, not binary. So some people just need to hear something once and have it perfectly, others need to hear it a lot and still don't remember it well.

My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.

I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory

[saghm]

> My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.

Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.

[fjfaase]

I sometimes have the experience that there is one word in a sentence that I did not get (often prompting me to say 'huh'), and that after some pondering, I suddenly get it and 'hear' the word being replayed in my head, and it suddenly becomes perfectly clear what word the person said (often prompting me to say 'okay').

[FreeFull]

Echoic memory is also very useful when someone says something, but you haven't understood them right away. There is also iconic memory, which stores the things you see and lasts less than a second.

[Tor3]

I have echoic memory for audio, and that's indeed very useful.

But I don't have 'playback' memory for anything else, definitely not for visuals or touch. So if something is said around me and I didn't listen, I can replay the last couple of seconds or so, and that's usually enough. Helps with languages you're not fluent in too. But if I suddenly notice that I'm now touching something that I shouldn't, say, for example with my arm, in a crowded pub, there's just no way I can 'replay' history, not even the last moments, to figure out how that happened. Unless I actually paid attention when it happened. Same with visuals. If I didn't recognize what passed before my eyes there's no way to replay that to take a better look. Unlike with audio, where I can do precisely that.

[anyAccount4]

It's cool to find that echoic memory has a name - the number of times it has saved my bacon in class when I'm not paying attention and the teacher asks me what they just said to call me out....