A Soundtrack for Everything

There's a song for that

My husband and I recently learned that there is a term for something he has long-struggled to explain to me (and that I will likely reference here more than once). Essentially, he cannot picture anything in his mind, he can only visualize concepts. And I didn’t understand him until we found out what it was called, looked it up, and then discovered other people we know have the same issue… This condition is called aphantasia. (And it’s baffling to me that my husband — who is an exceptionally gifted visual media designer — has it.)

I, on the opposite end of the spectrum, have hyperphantasia. I picture things with sound, smell, taste, and texture. So, if you ask me to think of an apple, I can think of its shiny skin, it’s mealy texture, the juice that comes out when you bite it, and its smell. It’s almost as if I am holding the apple in real life, even though it’s in my head/mind’s-eye. Same thing with an elephant (please don’t make me smell that!)

Once we made this discovery, it made many, many other things make sense — like why I had to stop watching Game of Thrones, how I see words in my head when I am spelling them, or how I remember song lyrics after a single listen. Meanwhile my husband, who’s also a talented musician, struggles to recall lyrics for songs he’s heard hundreds of times and absolutely loves (and can watch very stressful things and pleasantly move on with his day like the optimist he is).

It also seems to explain how certain songs evoke specific memories or places for me irrespective of any actual connection to those times and places. Like, I may think a song distinctly reminds me of shopping for groceries, even if I’ve never heard it while shopping for groceries. But if I hear it, I will picture shopping for groceries or riding the subway or standing at the beach….

Because of this, I have mixes/playlists of songs that I have made for all types of occasions… baths, Fridays at work, morning walks on mellow days (vs. animated days vs. optimistic days). I even have mixes for specific days and time periods because they bring me right back to — for instance — vintage clothes shopping in Portland, Oregon in 2015.

But the absolute best — to me — is playlists that become soundtracks for people.

And this is a spot where my husband and I converge. We absolutely love making playlists/mixes for people. Sometimes we even do it together for our friends. And we especially do it for characters in our creative projects.

Chat GPT was recently spitting out pages and pages of advice (as it does) for how to market a novella I just finished drafting, and one of the items was to post “mood boards.” I’m not really a mood board person — though I do love a good collage! — so the only thing I could think of was: maybe posting character playlists is commensurate to mood boards….

So, to that end, playlists and other soundtracks for everything are forthcoming.

Cover Art: Apple Painting - Gouache by rebecca.rocket