Sound to me is spatial and that because it triggers my spatial modalities of perception such as vision, touch and proprioception. Through the latter ones, a person perceives space and its properties such as shapes, relations, textures, materiality, as well as his/her body’s relation to space and particular objects. Therefore, when I hear a sound, I have the tendency to visualise, spatialise and make kinaesthetic projections onto my body.
For example, when hearing the workers building on the construction site, I particularly focus on the sounds being produced using their tools. Those make me visualise materials being transformed; I try to understand the nature of the material itself, how rigid that is, what kind of texture it may have and the kinds of visual transformations that take place when it collides with different tools.
Or when hearing the echo of a person walking or talking in a space, I close my eyes and visualise how spacious and tall this room is. Or when raining, I render spatial the rain’s strength or the environment’s humidity degree. Finally, because of my dancing experience and the effect of neural mirroring on me, when hearing to music such as the sleeping beauty, I visualise famous dancing patterns and sometimes I perceive the difficulty to execute them.