Having no true music training, I didn’t refer to the sound as “notes” on paper; it became shapes that I could see in my head as I listened intently to the multiple layers of instruments. Like colorful building blocks stacked upon each other, music became something that I could “see,” a neurological condition known as synesthesia, where when one sense is activated (hearing) and another unrelated sense (vision) is activated at the same time. My inability to read music sharpened my musical memory, because the only way I could retain information was to take a mental snapshot of it in my head,
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