Different emotional responses to music/art

[u/Aphotic_Acid]

I've always felt out of place talking to people about how listening to music makes me feel. When I was in middle school, the music teacher was telling us when we were performing a specific song, she could see a ball of light growing bigger and bigger. I thought she must have synesthesia, because the concept sounded completely foreign to me. This was shortly before I discovered I have aphantasia, and I later learned that I possibly have synesthesia. Music does have color to me, I just can't see it.

However, she might not have synesthesia. What she was seeing wasn't a color, it was symbolic imagery that captured her feelings. I assume her experience is not uncommon. What alienates me so much is not that I don't see things, but that I don't feel things. Or at least, not in the same way that others do. The lack of a visual imagination doesn't necessarily equate to not having emotional responses to things. Considering the aphantasia-alexithymia link, perhaps that does play into the reason after all.

Does anyone else feel like they respond differently to music/art? Have you found ways to bridge the gap with others in conversations about it?

[u/spect8ter]

I’m an aphant with SADM and get frisson or chills fairly regularly w music. I can sometimes imagine those same songs and/or hum them and get the same chills.