As an early-career researcher, I have the privilege of investigating aphantasia in musicians. I learned about my own aphantasia in 2018, while perusing social media. I read a basic description of aphantasia: “inability to visualize images in the mind’s eye,” and immediately identified that I have aphantasia!
Aphantasia was first named in 2015, to denote reduced or absent voluntary visual mental imagery. Typically, when recalling memories, familiar people, or any idea of a mental picture, the average person can create a visual image that has color, illumination, and clarity. However, a person with visual aphantasia experiences complete darkness (pure aphantasia), or else a blurry non-functional mental image (hypophantasia).
Aphantasia is multisensory, and can impact cognition of other senses: sound, tastes, scents, tactile sensation, even movement. For example, a person with auditory aphantasia cannot recreate memories of sound, inner music, or inner speech in their mind’s ear as actual sound. Instead, their experience is silence or something very faint. It is incorrect to assume that an aphantasic person lacks imagination or is uncreative. It is merely a different way of recalling information. Many aphantasics live average lives.
After discovering my aphantasia, I reflected on musical advice from conservatoire teachers: “Hear it in your mind… then play it.” “Tell a story with the music…” But with aphantasia, these tasks are impossible. To share about my aphantasic musician experience, I wrote a few articles which appeared in Psyche.co, The Strad, and the Journal of the American Viola Society (Spring 2023 issue).
I felt a continued calling to bring awareness to aphantasia in musical spaces. Given my interdisciplinary background in music and mental health, I realized I could conduct research myself. In 2025, I secured a PhD position at the University of Salford, supported by the Leverhulme Trust Aural Diversity Doctoral Research Hub (LAURA).
In Spring 2026, I launched a mixed-methods survey which collected responses from aphantasic musicians of all levels. They completed two mental imagery assessments, to determine if they had visual and/or auditory aphantasia. From over 120 responses, I conducted a mini analysis of 42 stringed players. More than half identified as amateur musicians, while others were professionals, semi-professionals or former/retired musicians. Half of the participants played guitar. Respondents were divided into two groups based on experience:
- Having both visual and auditory aphantasia
- Having only visual aphantasia
The two groups answered about musical performing preferences in different ways. Interestingly, musicians with visual aphantasia preferred to perform while reading from sheet music and or visual aids (9/12), while musicians with both visual and auditory aphantasia showed a preference for performing from memory (20/30). The two groups reported a differing experience of earworms. Those with visual and auditory aphantasia experienced rare earworms (M = 2.58), which are presumably experienced silently. Those with only visual aphantasia reported frequent earworms (M = 5.33). The two groups both did not express strong interest in expressing emotions while performing; musicians with auditory and visual aphantasia showed slightly less interest (Mean = 3.7) than those with visual aphantasia (M = 3.9).
Numerous write-in responses were collected. Here are two particularly interesting ones:
1. Violist, 56, female, former/retired, pure auditory & visual aphantasia:
“Suzuki method relies on listening memory recall to match pitch. I could not do that and had to rely on reading music.”
The Suzuki method is arguably the most widely used approach in teaching violin, particularly with young students. Beginners do not read from notation; instead, they learn pieces by ear by listening to recordings. This allows students to master physical technique first. But a student with aphantasia could struggle to remember music that is only heard, without having a visual aid.
2. Violinist, 46, female, semi-professional, pure auditory & visual aphantasia:
“When thinking about/of music, I can only think of one musical line at a time, and only within my vocal range. My guess is that I am subvocalising and that gives me the feeling of knowing the pitch and timbre, but I don’t ever actually hear any sounds in my head.”
This quote illustrates that aphantasic musicians have a silent inner experience of music, linked to kinaesthetic feeling. This musician’s concept of “subvocalising” indicates that a physical feeling, perhaps in the voice box/larynx, may accompany a silent sense of understanding musical pitch and tone quality.
Ultimately, having aphantasia does not prevent a person from being a musician. Aphantasic musicians can develop adaptive ways to think about music, compose, improvise, read from notation, and much more. With my research, I hope to identify the various adaptive strategies which aphantasic musicians use in their work
Neesa Suncheuri Sunar