Acousmatic Voices: Creativity, Inspiration and Madness
Kenneth M. Alewine, Doctoral Candidate, Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston
Voice hearing is a medico-religious phenomenon that often amplifies the ambiguous junction between creativity and mental illness. While schizophrenics and melancholics hear unbidden voices, religious poets and composers have evoked them as a method for developing compositions and poems. In ancient times, inspiration was thought to be an audible influence emanating from mysterious sources outside the mind, from the poetic utterances of the sibyls interpreting the Greek oracles to the Hebrew prophets hearing the voice of Elohim from indistinct clouds. Poets and musicians have similarly felt visited by creative ideas, and the notion that voices originate from untraceable sources suggests that inspiration is in some way automatic and susceptible to the flow of powerful influences.
Hearing voices that may emanate from indeterminate spaces outside the mind is similar to auditioning forms of acousmatic sound, like bells ringing from a church, or the reverberations of a siren Dopplering off in the distance, where the source of the music or noise remains uncertain. Acousmatic voices and sounds are compelling because unlike visual objects they are not easily located. As Walter Ang observes, “Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer.” Likewise, music saturates physical space, unlike visual objects, which require pointed focus.
This presentation will examine the works of religious poets and composers who believed they heard cosmic voices and who were also treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. Such works explore inspiration as an auditory experience and render on a nebulous continuum, and not by distinct categories, those voices pathologized as mental illness and those celebrated as a source for artistic inspiration. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the ear is privileged over the eye in communications with God, complicating the traditions of treatment among the disciplines of medicine, which favor the medical gaze.
Voice hearing is a medico-religious phenomenon that often amplifies the ambiguous junction between creativity and mental illness. While schizophrenics and melancholics hear unbidden voices, religious poets and composers have evoked them as a method for developing compositions and poems. In ancient times, inspiration was thought to be an audible influence emanating from mysterious sources outside the mind, from the poetic utterances of the sibyls interpreting the Greek oracles to the Hebrew prophets hearing the voice of Elohim from indistinct clouds. Poets and musicians have similarly felt visited by creative ideas, and the notion that voices originate from untraceable sources suggests that inspiration is in some way automatic and susceptible to the flow of powerful influences.
Hearing voices that may emanate from indeterminate spaces outside the mind is similar to auditioning forms of acousmatic sound, like bells ringing from a church, or the reverberations of a siren Dopplering off in the distance, where the source of the music or noise remains uncertain. Acousmatic voices and sounds are compelling because unlike visual objects they are not easily located. As Walter Ang observes, “Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer.” Likewise, music saturates physical space, unlike visual objects, which require pointed focus.
This presentation will examine the works of religious poets and composers who believed they heard cosmic voices and who were also treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. Such works explore inspiration as an auditory experience and render on a nebulous continuum, and not by distinct categories, those voices pathologized as mental illness and those celebrated as a source for artistic inspiration. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the ear is privileged over the eye in communications with God, complicating the traditions of treatment among the disciplines of medicine, which favor the medical gaze.