The spooky pulsing, strobing color-house: why do we encounter it so often in synaesthetic experiences of music? The sounds on the record seem to refer not to the various instruments that made them, but to a single multiform organism, a dynamic system of functional parts. Songs become machine-castles, steam-powered gear houses, benevolent calliopes with panda-eye windows, ancient computers. (George Martin's harpsichord intro makes it immediately clear that the house in "Fixing a Hole" is this sort of house.)

"Hearing is primarily a way of knowing about the world: from the sounds that reach our ears, we infer relevant properties of the objects that caused them. Presented with a complex of regular, coordinated sounds, we posit an object with regular, coordinated parts. When the sounds of modern recorded music suggest no natural object, we posit self-transforming pinwheel mansions."

Or might these inner cartoons come from some deep part of the brain that imagines, entirely from the inside, what its outer appearance might be like? "Given all these senses, how should I picture the body that receives them? What form could contain these multiple entrances, and how would it look lit from within? Could this possible map of openings be my true face?"