I can hear music in my head as if its playing from headphones but only for a short period of time and only if i know the song very well. Basically if i know all the lyrics and the melody pops into my head for any reason i can play the whole song to myself in my mind and just jam out. As far as super powers go its pretty chill ngl.

Edit: just thought id mention a slight draw back, i get a lot of awful and annoying pop songs that can get stuck in my head. If i hear a song in my head and its that clear then often it will just play on repeat over and over until i hear something else, or force myself to think of a different song which is hard to do when you have a song crystal clear playing on the radio in your head.

This grew a lot longer than planned, so I hope it manages to be informative and not just indulgent, lol.

Yes, I can have songs/tracks stuck in my head (though all too often in the form of some obsessively looping motif), or voluntarily "play" them with a varying but generally satisfying degree of accuracy and completeness.

I don't want to exaggerate it though. It's not as if I'm having full-on auditory pseudohallucinations, for one thing (I get to the other thing after a couple more paragraphs). Just as typical visualization is a quasi-visual experience that has a "visual feel" but is distinct from retinal visual input, this is a quasi-auditory experience. It is (for me) clearly not the same as hearing actual sound. It's only some part of the experience that lies somewhere downstream of the physical sensation of sound hitting my eardrums.

But it's not simply all of the perception part with the stimulation part cleanly omitted. Then I can only imagine it would have a hallucinatory nature (which it does for a few[1]). It's further "detached" to some varying degree. Sometimes it's rather effortful, and other times it can feel nearly real in the sense that I don't have to actively make it be there.

Even so, it comes out with what feels like at least adequate fidelity. Right now, for example, while "playing" the beginning of Julie Andrews singing "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music, it seems like I'm getting a lot of the nuances of her articulation and intonation. Those nuances may or may not be quite accurate to the original, but it's enough to passably emulate the experience of actually listening to it, except for the part where it feels like I have to do a lot of the work myself.

So with one such relatively uncomplicated "stream" to deal with, there is "bandwidth" for a good amount of detail like that. Beyond that it degrades in a way, which brings me to the other thing: It's not as if I'm having a perfectly complete experience in which all the parts are present all at once. There's a focal point (usually the vocals, if present) and usually maybe one other thing can be happening along with it in a way that seems more or less complete and concurrent. Beyond that, parts will fade or drop out entirely, come back during lulls in the other parts, and drop out again. A sort of skeleton that overall delivers an acceptable composite of sorts.

    > actually able to play a sound in their head without humming

Some of the research finds (or asserts? argues? submits?) that all of these forms of mental imagery (visual or otherwise) are "aborted" forms of actual experiences or actions. Consider, for example, a spectrum with "reading aloud" (or "speech" generally) at one end, whose aborted form is subvocalization in which the vocal cords and the articulatory parts are minutely but visibly engaged. Then suppose that an experience of fully inner speech is a further aborted form of that. Then maybe something further "inward", like "worded thinking".[2][3]

For a parallel example, consider kinesthetic mental imagery -- imagining doing something physically (not visualization, but what I think your coach really means when he tells you to "visualize" an action). Here, similarly, the skeletal muscles are minutely engaged (according to some paper or other that I can't cite at the moment and am not really qualified to assess). This is, IIRC, shown to be at least somewhat as effective as actually practicing the action, and also hints vaguely that there could be something to your idea about the spoofed dopamine reward.

In this way, with the music, it's kind of like an aborted subvocalization, and if I let it be a sort of subvocalization, with the little movements of the vocal cords, it supports more "streams". I have to do this to just barely manage to "play" a three-note chord such that I feel like I can be aware of each tone at the same time (I say "feel" because it's fragile/shaky enough that I get the sense I could just be doing some deft plate-spinning). All of which (since the quote up there) is to say that I think needing to hum is at least probably on the same continuum rather than being something utterly divorced from some kind of supernatural feat of sound-conjuring.

1. e.g., Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and his auditory hallucinations of intricate arrangements (See the very beginning of "Wouldn't It Be Nice" for one example of the sort of thing that some will recognize as very obviously originating from such a hallucination): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Musicianship_of_B...

2. https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html#target4

3. And maybe all of these different forms of imagery-as-aborted-stimulation converge into "unsymbolized thinking"?