Part 1: Sharpening Your Internal Senses So You Can Observe and Recognize the creative Process That Runs within You.
Internal Senses
To become a highly creative songwriting force, you need to learn to “build links” to your unconscious, creative resources.
When you can do this, you will be able to develop an unstoppable flow of creative musical ideas.
In the following chapters you will learn how to become intimate with much more of what’s going on inside your mind. You will learn how you represent musical ideas to yourself. You will also learn how to notice much more musical information than you’ve ever noticed before.
Until now, it’s very likely that you’ve been creating music from a consciously controlled environment; only drawing from what’s in the center of your attention.
The problem with this is there is much more going on outside the focus of your attention than within the center of it.
And it’s the ideas and musical perceptions outside of the center of your focus that hold the most meaning and quality. By learning to look outside your normal focus of attention, and by becoming intimate with the way you represent music to yourself you will become an expert at locating these musical ideas created by your richer resources.
In the following section you will also learn to train your “musical ear” so you can hear any note and immediately know exactly what note was being played. This skill, known as “perfect pitch,” will allow you to easily decode the musical ideas that you create.
Let’s begin by developing your internal “musical senses.” Once you’ve practiced the following exercises for a few hours, you will have the ability to clearly hear music inside your head, in stunning detail.
Modalities: How do You Decode Musical Ideas in Your Brain?
To fully take advantage of the musical ideas that occur to you, you need to understand and become fully aware of how you represent music to yourself.
This involves going “inside your head” and watching to see what happens!
To do this effectively though, it will save you a lot of time if you know what to look for. So in this chapter you are going to learn what and how to look for the musical ideas that are presenting themselves inside your head.
What does the word “thinking” mean to you?
Most people assume that the word “thinking” means “talking to yourself.” This internal dialogue is, in fact, thinking, but you can think in many more ways than this.
There Are Twelve Different Ways You Can Think
There are actually 12 different ways in which you can represent things to yourself.
These 12 ways of “thinking” are called thinking modalities.
What are the 12 types of thinking modalities that you can use to “think” with?
Here’s a list:
1. Auditory-This form of modality occurs in the form of sounds inside your head. Obviously this thinking modality is important in the process of writing music.
2. Auditory Digital-This modality is when you hear your own voice inside your head. When you talk to yourself inside your head you are using this auditory digital thinking modality.
3. Visual-The visual modality is being used when you see pictures in your minds eye.
4. Kinesthetic-This modality is describing internal sensations of touch. For example when you
5. Gustatory-This modality is referring to internal tastes. If you think to yourself what an apple tastes like, and get an internal impression of this taste, this is utilizing your olfactory thinking modality.
6. Olfactory-This modality refers to an internal impression of smell. If you think of a really pleasant perfume, and get an internal impression of this smell, you are thinking with this gustatory modality.
These are the six ways that you can represent things internally.
But wait! I said 12 ways!
You’re right. Here’s why you can represent things internally to yourself in 12 different ways.
Each of the thinking modalities I’ve listed above can be used in two different ways, which are:
1. Remembered
2. Constructed
If your favorite song is playing in your head that is an example of using your remembered auditory modality.
On the other hand, if you are creating a new musical idea, it is constructed auditory.
Here’s another example just to make this very clear. If I asked you to remember the first house you lived in, you would see a picture in your head of this house. This is visual remembered.
If though, I asked you to picture the house you would live in if you had $20 million, you would make a visual constructed picture of this luxurious house.
Internal Representations
You can think in 12 different ways. These different ways are like building blocks that you use to create what goes on inside your head.
Every time you make a picture in your head, hear a sound, smell an internal smell, taste an internal taste, or feel an internal touch, you are making an internal representation.
And these internal representations are going on inside your head, 24 hours a day. And there aren’t just a few—there are millions and millions of them!
You might say, “But I don’t notice millions and millions of internal representations. In fact, I only notice a few of these flashing in and out on occasions!”
The reason for this is that most of your internal representations happen at an unconscious level.
As you have learned, most of your processing power lies in the depths of your unconscious mind. Your conscious mind can only handle five to seven bits of information compared to your unconscious mind whose processing power is practically infinite!
What Modalities Do You Use To Create Music?
This is where things really get interesting!
Out of the six modalities, which ones do you use when creating fresh, inspiring music?
Well, you use your auditory modality. This is when you hear sounds in your head.
Another important one is your kinesthetic modality. For example, when you are “feeling inspired” there is usually a kinesthetic element in this state. Also, when you come up with a musical idea, you may get a kinesthetic sensation that gives you feedback as to whether the idea is great or not.
It’s also possible to involve your visual modality into the music creation process. In fact, it can be very useful to do this and is a fascinating part of the way a musical genius composes. (We’ll cover this much more later on.)
It’s rare, but some people can use their olfactory modality (internal taste) in the musical creation process.
Synesthesia
Some FP will be happy about this.
Synesthesia is a condition that occurs in a small percentage of the population where there is a crossover between the way information is represented.
For example, people without synesthesia will represent a piece of music to themselves as “sounds,” and only use their auditory modality to represent this incoming information.
However, a person with synesthesia may hear this music and also see it as a color. This is the “synesthetes crossover” of the auditory and visual modalities.
Another example is somebody hearing sounds as both sound and taste. In other words the sound is being represented using both the auditory and olfactory modality.
These crossover relationships are called “synesthetic relationships.”
Ok. You might think, this is interesting, but how on earth does it apply to me making great, memorable songs?
Well, here’s why it’s important. When you study the musical geniuses of the world, there is something that all these great minds have in common. In fact, this seems to be true for geniuses in just about any field.
They all have synesthesia!
Isn’t that interesting?!
For example, when Mozart would write a piece of music, there are three clear synesthesia relationships. (More on this in "The Mozart Report")
There was a kinesthetic/auditory relationship; an auditory/visual relationship; and it’s also speculated that there was a relationship between sound and taste, i.e. auditory/olfactory.
And this sort of synesthesia seems to be common territory to any artist who has changed the face of the earth with their music.
Read these quotes from three musical greats and see if you can spot the synesthetic relationships… (Ok, the bolded text gives you a few clues!)
“I begin to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height and depth, and, since I am aware of what I want to do, the underlying idea never deserts me. It rises, it grows, I hear and see the image in front of me from every angle, as if it had been cast like a sculpture, and only the labor of writing it down remains…”-Beethoven
“A genuine creator… will… have the gift of seeing—illuminated in the mind’s eye, as if by a flash of lightning—a complete musical form… he will have the energy, persistence, and skill to bring this envisioned form into existence, so that even after months of work, not one of its details will be lost or fail to fit in to his photographic picture.”
Paul Hindermith
“Once you set up your idea of the material, you kind of sit back. You look at it. You think about it, and you feel it. And then, if you’re sensitive to it, it starts to tell you what it wants to do. It’s like it starts to move in a certain direction. If you’re sensitive, you’ll just kind of say ‘um humh,’ and then you’ll just start writing it down… These are amorphous images that I am speaking of now, not the eighth notes or sixteenth notes or b-flats. It’s kind of like a painting, but not exactly. It’s an abstract image.”- Michael Colgrass (Pulitzer prize-winning composer)
Here’s The Good News
Two things: Firstly, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that everyone is born with synesthesia. It’s just that as we grow older we learn to suppress it (among many other things, such as our genius musical ideas!)
When you listen to somebody talk you can even notice this bottled up synesthesia come out in their speech patterns. They might say something like, “The color blue is cool, while red is hot.”
This suggests that there is a synesthetic relationship between color and temperature or kinesthetic (touch).
This is a visual/kinesthetic synesthesia.
Neurologist Richard Cytowic, in a study of people who were born fully synesthetic, hypothesized that the intertwining of senses must occur deep in the limbic system. This portion of the brain is completely outside our awareness and is responsible for primitive drives, such as hunger, emotion, and sexual desire.
This means that everyone has synesthesia relationships happening all the time. It’s just that for most of the population, it happens outside of their awareness.
The second important thing is that there are exercises and procedures you can do that will encourage you to notice these synesthetic relationships in your music creation process.
Now, I’m not suggesting you develop fully blown synesthesia here—not at all. There can be many drawbacks to having a strong dose of this condition, and most of the “co-mingling of the senses” are best done in your unconscious, outside of your awareness.
But you can learn to use multiple modalities in your musical creation process that will enable you to utilize your brain in a similar way to the geniuses in the quotes above. Later in this book you will learn procedures to help you become aware of your musical co-mingling of senses. And it will be as fascinating an experience for you as it was for me!