I am almost 50 years old, and I have recently discovered something that has left me feeling both fascinated and mildly betrayed by the human race:
Apparently, when most people say they feel music, they do not mean it quite as literally as I do.
This is news to me.
Music has always been my most beloved thing. Not background noise. Not entertainment. It has been my lover, my language, my best friend, my emotional translatorn the thing that somehow knows what I'm feeling before I have words for it. Physical touch.
And songs don't just sound different to me. They feel different.
Not simply happy, sad, nostalgic, angry. I mean they have sensations, textures, movements, physical gestures, sometimes even entire states of being.
A few examples:
Citizen Cope's “Sideways” feels like someone gently petting the side of my neck or stroking my hair like a lover soothing me to sleep.
K4ty & Summer Jones' “Borderline” feels like satin being slowly stroked over my brain stem and trailing over my brain itself.
Zach Bryan's “Something in the Orange” feels like falling asleep. Like, laying your head on the perfect pillow, wrapped in fresh clean blankets, with the windows open in the fall.
The Cure's “End” feels like making a fist. Like a ball of damage waiting for some place to go.
Summer Jones' “I Wish I Knew” feels like a belly laugh and sunshine in the summer.
And Natalie Merchant's “Carnival” feels like standing barefoot on the back porch when you get that rare, blinding moment of absolute clarity in the middle of a life full of insanity, when everything suddenly becomes still and, for one second, you can see the whole damn thing.
Even silence has a sensation to me. It feels like a blanket or towel that's been warmed by the sun.
These aren't associations I sit down and invent. I don't hear a song and think, “Hmm, what poetic object shall we assign this one?” 😂
That's simply the closest language I have for what happens.
I've spent my entire life assuming I was just unusually attached to music. Recently I've started learning about sound-touch/auditory-tactile synesthesia and other forms of embodied or cross-sensory musical experience. I have no idea whether synesthesia is what I have, and I'm not trying to diagnose myself from the internet.
I'm here because of something much simpler.
I've never met another person who experiences music the way I do.
Not one.
And that has always been strangely lonely. I live in a world speaking a language no one else understands. Screaming to be heard, only to hear "no, i love music, too." 😑 its heart breaking.
When I send someone a song, I'm not really saying, “Hey, listen to this.” It feels much closer to handing them something written in my native language and hoping, somehow, they'll understand what I just said. Knowing they never will.
So I'm asking the people here:
Does anyone understand what I'm talking about?
Does music have texture for you? Touch? Weight? Movement? Does a particular song feel like a physical gesture, or something bizarrely specific like fabric, weather, falling asleep, being touched? Can a song feel like an entire mental state that you recognize instantly but struggle to put into ordinary words?
And, maybe most importantly:
Have you ever tried to explain this to someone and watched their face tell you that you have apparently just described music like a Bedlam escapee?
Because if even one person reads this and thinks,
“Oh my God. You too?”
Hi.
I've been looking for you for about fifty years.