Every Picture Tells A Story

  Along with a billion or so other folk (at the very least - there don't seem to be any exact numbers, so I'm making a conservative estimate based on the few stats I could find), I own an mp3 player. Unlike the majority of those people, however, it isn't an iPod - too expensive, don't subscribe to corporations trying to sell me a lifestyle, thanks - and I almost never use it. It merely sits, neglected & slightly forlorn, (in a dusty & slightly-off-white-oval casing sort of way) on a shelf in my bedroom. The battery's out of charge too, most likely. Shameful way to treat a perfectly functional device, really.

I know, we musicians are meant to listen to as much music as possible, to absorb & learn from a multitude of influences, blah blah blah. The thing is, most of the time I already have a soundtrack going on in my head - any extraneous noises can feel like an intrusion, an incredibly irritating distraction from what only I can hear. Or that might just be an excuse for acting like a grumpy sod who tends to ignore other people, given half a chance..? Hmm. It isn't, though, that my brain's only acting like a jukebox stuck on "random play", regurgitating stuff it's ingested over the last 40 years or so. Rather, it keeps on creating new music ("new" to me, anyway - the possibility of true originality is a much more dangerous issue, possibly for a blog post in 2014, or thereabouts), in response to strong visual stimuli - particularly landscapes. Abstract ones, at that.

An "interesting" picture or place - suddenly the music will start. Frustratingly, for the most part it's music I either couldn't begin to play myself (my limited piano-clomping, for instance), or simply don't have the resources (time, money, recording space, Manu Katché, etc) to realise...and those are the bits that tend to get stuck the deepest, keep coming around most often, etc. Sometimes, though, after a fair bit of nagging, and several sessions brutalising my fingers around "difficult" fretless bass chords, just sometimes...stuff comes out. And then promptly disappears, so if I haven't written the fundamentals of it down, that's it. 'Tis gone.

An old friend of mine, who's a writery-sort-of-fellow, has a very-similar-but-obviously-slightly-different take on visuals and the creative blobby bits of the mind here.

Anyway, wondered if other folk "hear" images, too, so I'll leave you with a wee "picture quiz"...

What sounds/music (if any) do these (entirely-natural, no editing-performed-upon-them I swear) images bring to mind...and please, if you have the foggiest, "why?"

Well, maybe not that last one...


p.s. this was originally going to be about the incredibly fascinating topic of synaesthesia, but that would have taken a lot more research than I have time for at the moment. For anyone who's interested, however, I reckon clicking here could be a fine place to start.