Is audiation universal, like the natural human ability to imagine and manipulate and rotate complex 3D scenes in the mind? I'm thinking it is, because many people say "I can imagine that sentence being read in so-and-so's voice".
I can fake it as in a dream, and I can recall images I've seen of real scenes, but that's not the same thing.
Applying someone's voice pattern is very common.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
I think you might be doing what he says he's doing, ideation happens in the minds eye just like recalling an image. If I picture a cat, I can flip the cat around in my head, or I can put the cat in an alleyway and I picture the whole scene.
There are people who can't imagine pictures in their head, such as your example manipulating 3D scenes in your mind. They couldn't do that. That's known as aphantasia. There are also people without an inner-monologue, so they don't think inside their head. I couldn't find the name of that.
It's an alien world to think of any of those possibilities, I guess you would work around it. I knew a graphic designer with aphantasia, and she was just as capable as the others!
There are many remarkable (probably widespread) mental phenomena that are completely overlooked/unvalued (at least by most materialist cultures). Partly because they don't have names that are ever mentioned. 'Qualia','synesthesia' (which I had when young and sadly ... lost? before I ever knew the idea). 'Audiation' ... the term's entirely new to me ( I began playing when I was 5) and (says WP) was not even coined until 1975. What else goes nameless, unseen, unheard?
How many kids have such abilities that are completely-overlooked, like the kid some writer (was it Huxley)? saw scratching an advanced math proof in the sand? How was it that Mozart could 'write entire works in his head'? Probably because as a prodigy he was taught the value of such skills. We can only speculate about all the horsepower going to waste - while young minds are stuffed with sugar and advertisements.