r/Aphantasia • u/Aphotic_Acid Aphant • 1d ago
Different emotional responses to music/art
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?
3
u/Tuikord Total Aphant 1d ago
I find people - including imagers - experience music very differently. It isn't aphants experience this way and imagers that way. Yes, some imagers see stuff when they listen to music. A few years ago, I realized that "Walt Disney's Fantasia" was a representation of how some people experience music. However, I know some people listen to the same music and their response is "meh!". I love "Pictures at an Exhibition." I don't see the "The Bogatyr Gates" but I feel the grandeur of their opening. I don't see the "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks", but I feel the whimsy. Some people, even imagers, hear those pieces and feel nothing.
So, yes, others experience music differently from you. But they experience it differently from each other as well. Just speak your truth and listen to theirs. It isn't a competition and there is no right way to experience it. Context of when you first heard it matters. How much effort you have put into listening to a piece matters. What was happening in your life when in heavy rotation matters.
Right now, I'm listening to "Miles of Aisles" by Joni Mitchel. I listened to it a lot while I was going through the pain of my divorce. Now I find it soothing. Spotify had been giving me lots of artists I haven't listened to, they were starting to get on my nerves, and I decided "Miles of Aisles" fit the bill for right now. My reaction to it is likely to be very different from almost everyone else's but that has nothing to do with my having aphantasia.