Inner speech, the voice in your head, is a form of auditory imagery. Auditory aphantasia may be linked to differences in how people experience it.
Pimentel Aldaz and Spence · Multisensory Research
In an online study, 249 UK adults (almost all women) listened to short piano pieces in each of the seven Western musical modes and wrote down the scenes and smells each piece brought to mind. Major modes tended to bring up nature, daytime and flowers; minor modes brought up darkness, stress, damp and smoke, and people grouped the pieces along the same line. The study was exploratory and did not measure how well each person could imagine.
Tolman · Auditory Perception & Cognition
Three classically trained musicians who report no inner hearing, a pianist and two singers, were interviewed about how they learn and rehearse music. They described relying on the feel of their hands, voice and breath, on memory of the written score, on silent syllables or number codes, and on music theory, and none had noticed their lack of inner hearing when they began training. The author suggests inner hearing may not be needed for several kinds of musical reasoning and rehearsal, and that teaching should offer other routes, though the study rests on interviews and did not measure performance.
Hubbard · Auditory Perception & Cognition
This review questions the usual line between the mind's ear (imagining outside sounds) and the inner voice (imagining one's own voice), which holds that only the inner voice carries movement information. Brain and muscle studies find movement-related activity when people imagine melodies and instrument sounds too, so the review argues that line does not hold. It suggests widening the inner voice to any sound a person makes, and separating the two by whether a sound is mapped to meaning or to action. It also asks whether someone without auditory imagery could keep its movement side.
Hayes, Miles and Evans · New Ideas in Psychology
Five people with aphantasia described leaning on facts, a soundless inner voice, and notes, photos and other people to remember. The authors suggest these strategies help but only partly offset real memory difficulties.
Nedergaard and Lupyan · Psychological Science
People reporting little inner speech (anendophasia) recalled fewer words and judged picture rhymes less accurately, with no difference in task switching. The gaps vanished among those who said they talked out loud.
Hashim and colleagues · Music & Science
People with aphantasia felt slightly less intense emotion to film music and reported fewer music-evoked memories, yet enjoyed music as much as others. The authors suggest imagery may deepen musical emotion but is not needed to enjoy music.