Active Imagination

I seldom listen to music while I'm in the process of writing music, as it interferes with the writing part of my brain. Also when you're working on one thing for hours, you become saturated with it as a form of background ambient music. When I'm working on something visual, music enhances the rate and quality of the creative experience overall, both for music writing and art. Music then becomes a visual experience, at least in the part of the brain involved in imagining the work, i.e. planning, organizing, combining, revising, etc. For true synesthetes (Kandinsky, David Hockney, and others) this is the norm, but we can achieve similar states by alternating between those parts of the brain that naturally overlap for all people.