When I sing something to myself, of course I can't sing the note of the guitar line or the harmony at the same time as the melody. But somehow it seems like I'm always 'thinking' that part, even if I'm not 'hearing' it. Sometimes there's a song where a part will be repeated, but with a different backing part. Sloan has a couple of very effective moments like this on their new one, in which the chorus gets short-circuited by being resolved a line early. When I sing these to myself, I find that sometimes I can't very well control which backing part I'm 'thinking.' I'll plan on it being one part, but then I get there and...somehow, it just ends up being the other. At first it seemed like maybe it was that one part was just easier to imagine. But in a past instance of this I noted that it switched after a while; first I could only do one part, then at some point the other became much easier.

When I recently started singing these Sloan songs to myself I started to realize how strange this all was. How do I know what backing part I did if I'm not really hearing it at all? I wonder which parts of my brain are able to think about a frequency so abstractly. Then I wondered what it would be like if the melody itself were being processed on that same level. So I tried to hear that in my head without moving anything in my mouth or throat the way I would if I were actually singing it. I found this rather difficult. Often I could not restrain the slightest moves in my mouth toward forming the words in the lyrics, and in my throat shaping my vocal cords to make the frequencies in the melody. When I was able to do it, it took quite a bit of concentration to feel like I was keeping the right melody going, and it always seemed somehow distant. The difficulty of thinking about the backing part seemed about the same though. This whole layer of thinking notes without hearing them must be a way that we get around the brain's lack of polyphony with a sort of lo-fi representation. Or, considering that we can hear chords just fine, is the brain polyphonic and is it our vocal mechanism that's not up to the task?