The first session of the Inner Music and Wellbeing webinar series was a celebration of different disciplinary perspectives, featuring talks by two of our network members. Professor Andrea Halpern is a psychologist with a long-standing interest in individual differences in musical imagery across the lifespan from a cognitive and neural perspective, while Dr James Kennaway is a cultural historian offering fascinating insights from a medical humanities perspective on historical perceptions of musical imagery and mental health.
Professor Halpern’s talk focused on investigations of voluntary auditory imagery (intentionally generating a mental image of sound) and its uses. Through reference to an array of empirical studies spanning her research career, she revealed some of the contents of a psychologist’s toolbox by describing the different ways that psychologists have approached the challenge of capturing people’s inherently private experiences of imagined sound and music. Finally, Professor Halpern considered research relating to how voluntary auditory imagery can be applied productively to people’s lives. Examples include the use of voluntary musical imagery as a memory aid and as a supportive skill for musicians. She also recounted the story of a Haitian earthquake victim violinist Romel Joseph, who intentionally imagined entire classical works to pass the time while buried under rubble.
Dr Kennaway turned his attention to involuntary instances of musical imagery via a history of musical hallucinations. This was framed through reference to the broader historical shift from a supernatural to a medical perspective, illustrated with accounts of musical hallucinations from the 17th century through to the 19th century, largely drawn from the writings and medical notes of physicians. Examples of the opposition between psychiatry and religion were traced over time with reference to explanations of inner music as divine phenomena. Dr Kennaway cautioned against focusing exclusively on traditionally referenced sources to understand the history of musical hallucinations, since this can mask alternative perspectives on inner music, such as those described within the field of Mesmerism (e.g. accounts of telepathy), and Romanticism (e.g. accounts of the hallucinating musical genius). The talk concluded with a reminder that history reveals the contingency of our most deep-seated assumptions, concepts and frameworks, and with a call for collaboration with scientists.
Meeting points
In their different ways, each talk related to the question of the role of accounts of lived experience, including how people interpret and make sense of their own inner music. For example, in medical cases there has been a historic lack of patient voice regarding the meaning of musical hallucinations. The psychologist’s toolbox may incorporate rich qualitative methods such as the elicitation interview to investigate what a person’s inner music means to them (e.g. Huovinen & Tuuri, 2019).
Boundaries between phenomena also arose as a common theme in this webinar. Lively discussion related to blurred boundaries between experiencing inner music as hallucination versus other forms of musical imagery such as earworms. Boundaries between degrees of control of the inner music formed part of this discussion, and between music perceived as being present in the physical environment versus an internal phenomenon. Research shows that people with the least vivid auditory imagery scores were more likely to confuse how they had previously encountered a musical source in an experiment in which they previously either heard or were instructed to imagine music (Herholz et al., 2012).
Points for Reflection
An exciting avenue for further exploration is the role of inner music in religious contexts and as a feature of spirituality. Attitudes to inner music evolve over time, and research interest may shift from understanding the relationship between the music imagined and the circumstances of its imagining, to the meanings that we ascribe to inner music. Such inquiry should be sensitive to context, perspective, and contingent assumptions, and value accounts of lived experience.
Freya Bailes
References
Herholz, S. C., Halpern, A. R., Zatorre, R. J. (2012). Neuronal correlates of perception, imagery, and memory for familiar tunes. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; 24 (6), 1382-1397. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00216
Huovinen, E., & Tuuri, K. (2019). Pleasant musical imagery: Eliciting cherished music in the second person. Music Perception, 36(3), 314-330. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2019.36.3.314