Well, if I ever get any good at music, if I ever accomplish something and someone asks me, "Gosh Starling. Where do you get your ideas?" Here is what I have to say:
Our brain is constantly filling in the blanks, smoothing over the truly fragmented nature of our perception. If you hold your head still, you cannot move your eyes smoothly from left to right. They must move in jerky steps, pausing at various things that catch the eye.
Our brain smooths that process out so much, unless we pay attention, we don't even notice the jerkiness. I use the same smoothing technique to recall a song. Granted I can only recall bits and pieces, the melody for instance, or perhaps the dynamics, the underlying harmony. What I do recover is part of a contiguous whole. By making multiple passes I change what my memory is "listening" to, and everything else gets smoothed out. Anything I can't remember at all, I can use my knowledge of Music Theory to make an educated guess what should have gone there.
I can tell what notes to put down by listening to the songs in my head. That is how I get my ideas in music. The songs in my head are confluences and combinations of things I have heard before. I know this because when I play random things on the piano, or listen to a new song that demonstrates something I've never heard or listened to before, when I discover a new sound I like, only then does it appear in the songs I make up.
It's fairly simple, there are no supernatural influences I am aware of; no muse whispers into my ear. I am my own muse, I craft the new ideas from who I am, and who I am is told by what music I have listened to before. That's why it is so important to listen to all sorts of music, from baroque to 20th century contemporary, from jazz to Burmese folk music. I never know where the new sound will come up. It's also important to listen to music I like, otherwise I might end up getting sounds in my head that I don't want to use.
Many people these days seek a new and original sound; I listen to those people and I do experiment myself with new sounds. But I will never advocate rejecting sounds that have been done before simply because they have been done before. Everything I write I have heard before, and whether I sound like Bach or Prokofiev or something I figured out on my own, it will be music.
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