What It’s Like to Hear Music Like Mozart? My Once-in-a-Lifetime Moment

Mozart had all his music perfectly structured in his mind.

He didn’t have a single cross-out or revision.

His drafts were already the final copies of his amazing work.

Everything was already finished in his head.

And I wondered how he could have had an MP3 or WAV version of his music in mind from the beginning.

Did he make changes internally and listen to them with his mind’s ear?

Could he modify string sections and relisten to them as someone clicked on a Soundcloud file?

A psychiatrist or psychologist would call it a music hallucination.

Without any external source, your mind would play music as if it were listening to it from the outside.

And they would treat it as a neurological disease. A mental disorder that has to be treated and perhaps completely removed. Like extirpating a tumor that was always an external part of you, lurking in the background and waiting to harm you when you less expected it.

The thing is that music hallucinations are very rare. Only 0.16% of the general hospital population has experienced it. So it’s no wonder that the first reaction would be to treat it as a menace instead of a gift.

And I always wondered how hearing music in your head would feel.

I’m a musician and composer. You’d expect that I have angelical choruses and wonderful melodies playing in the background of my mind all the time. But sadly, it’s not the case.

When I write music, I always need to try a bunch of stuff on the keyboard, listening from the outside, before I integrate it into a coherent song. Thank God I was born in an age where we have virtual instruments! I could just change the sound of my piano into a violin, cello, or tuba and listen to that melody with a different timbre. I don’t have to imagine what it would sound like. It’s already one click away.

It’s a helpful proxy but I still search for the real thing.

By real, I mean my brain doing the heavy lifting.

And I don’t mean it as an anti-tech stance.

The amazing development of today’s music technology has given me wonderful music experiences I thought I’d never have.

It’s just that there’s a certain intimacy in listening to it inside you and being able to modify melodies as you go. Having that internal musical set would feel powerful. But it would also make the transition from mind music to written score much smoother and faster.

When Mozart did it, he was extremely fast at writing. He would write a whole symphony in days with no rewrites, ready to be played the very next day. He wasn’t composing; he was just transcribing what he already had written in his mind.

This scene from the movie Amadeus shows an amazing representation of his mind’s clarity.

He already has it all figured out; it’s the writing part that takes time, the little time he has left in his body. But it’s all there. Every section perfectly assembles with the others. Every beat is accounted for. Not a single note is missing.

But let’s leave the masterpieces to the geniuses out there.

What I experienced was much more straightforward.

It only happened once, but I got to feel what Mozart must’ve experienced all the time.

It happened 10 years ago.

I went with my band on an improvised tour around South America. We visited Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil without any booked venue beforehand. We would arrive in a city and play in the city center or on a busy street and our music journey would begin for that town. After some time, somebody would come and ask us to play in a bar or restaurant that day or the next one. Or we would meet someone who would connect us to someone else and open the musical doors in that city.

Every day was different; we never knew what would happen or where we would play that day.

When we arrived in a city in Brazil called Pelotas, we found a whole network of music promoters who helped us with everything from organizing gigs to housing our poor souls. And everything was free! This nonprofit organization opened a music venue that we would never have achieved on our own, especially in a country where we didn’t know the language.

But we all shared the language of music.

In any case, I found myself sleeping in their office/house one day with another of my fellow band members (they couldn’t fit us all in one place) when I had the most amazing music experience.

It was early in the morning when I woke up but I stayed in bed with my eyes closed. There was no rush to get up and I enjoyed being in this state between sleep and being awake. Out of nowhere, I started listening to one of the songs we’d been playing with my band during this trip. But the song was coming from inside. It was like listening to music with headphones only this time the CD player was my brain.

I somehow started isolating the tracks. I listened to the voice section and started modifying the melody to see if it might work if I introduced some changes to it. I “played” it again and listened. I kept doing this for a while. Maybe twenty minutes. I was in a state of flow. Not realizing how awesome this was. Just experiencing it and playing like a child would in a sandbox. I was completely immersed in it.

The morning silence helped me listen to these song variations very clearly. There were no distractions, and I always kept my eyes closed and barely moved. All my energy and focus were in my mind's music player.

But then I moved, or I opened my eyes, and it was gone.

And then I realized what happened.

I had a one-in-a-lifetime experience any musician would dream of having.

It felt so natural as if this was how it should always be.

I was happy I had it. I could now relate, even on a small scale, to how Mozart did it constantly. And I now have a new perspective on his work. I listen to his music in a different light and even feel like I’m listening to it as if I were inside Mozart’s head.

But I always wonder, will I get another glimpse into my mind’s music player ever again?

And if so, please let it not fade so quickly.

There’s much more I’d like to play with.

I don’t wanna go home to do chores.

Let me stay in the sandbox for a little longer.

Is it too much to ask?