[FumblingBear]

Thanks for sharing your experience with us!

I'm not a professional musician, but I've played and performed in different settings for about 15 years.

Until reading your comment, I didn't realize that many people don't get songs stuck in their head. I often get very long and complex songs stuck in my head for hours to days. Sometimes it's just portions, but sometimes it can be the full song.

I don't quite know how to describe my recollection of music, but it seems to be somewhat akin to eiditic memory, but for sounds. After looking into things, the term eichoic memory seems to come up, but I'm not sure it quite encapsulates what I'm trying to express.

Out of curiousity, do you have aphantasia? I do, and often wonder if the strength of my music recollection comes from a lack of visual recollection in my mind.

Sometimes it takes a few listens to fully memorize a song, but I can revisit music many years later and still have perfect recollection of the piece despite the complexity of the music I tend towards.

For example, my favorite band is Between the Buried and Me (a progressive metal band) and their compositions tend to use a ton of complex and mixed meter, as well as non-repetitive rhythmic patterns. Despite all that, I have perfect recollection of their music—even for songs over 17 minutes long.

Sorry for the long response—your comment just triggered some things I've been thinking about for a while and I wanted to process them and share.

[geoelectric]

I have aphantasia, and I also remember songs in multiple parts vividly. I won't go so far as to say it's eichoic--I can't, for example, turn around and just play a version of it on piano like some people I know, and I'm fairly sure I'm recalling an approximation in a lot of cases--but it's a detailed enough recollection I can "listen" to songs that way by recalling them. It's very much in contrast to my non-existent ability to recall even a familiar image.

I've considered cause/effect on this before and personally just decided it was probably coincidence combined with my poor visual memory making the other types seem that much more impressive. There's no particular compensatory mechanism I can think of that would explain remembering sound better because I remember vision worse.

Interestingly, I've never been any better at composition (i.e., imagining novel music) because of this. To the extent I've composed, I still pick stuff out a part at a time and figure out how it fits rather than starting with a finished sound in my head to recreate.

[FumblingBear]

Thanks for sharing!

I view things like perfect pitch as distinct from a strong musical recollection. With effort, I can transcribe music and eventually learn it, but it's a separate skill in my mind.

The ability to "listen" to songs by recalling them is more what I was referring to when discussing my experiences. I'm with you on the non-existent ability to recall imagery.

I have no idea if there is some type of connection between the two, but it's interesting that at least two of us seem to have similar experiences!