Inner Music in Fiction and Biography
‘Inner music’ or ‘musical imagery’ refers to the music that one hears in one’s own head. For example, an ‘earworm’ is a catchy piece of music that is stuck in one’s head and repeats involuntarily. Part of the work of the AHRC-funded Inner Music and Wellbeing Network is to create a database of public examples of imagined music in fiction and biography. These might be found in published biographies, films, literature, plays, poetry, published accounts, song TV programmes etc.
We are always looking for submissions to this database! If you would like to contribute, please fill out the form linked here.
Biography (3) Cartoons and comics (4) Films (3) Literature (8) Plays (1) Poetry (2) Published Account (1) Songs (5) TV Programmes (8)
SpongeBob SquarePants
A literal ear worm enters SpongeBob’s brain; his friends are trying to drive it out with another catchy tune
Star Trek: Next Generation
Star Trek: Next Generation, S3E3: ‘The Survivors’. Directed by Les Landau. 1989. On the surface of Delta Rana IV, the away team finds a small music box in the home of Kevin and Rishon Uxbridge. Later, aboard the Enterprise, Counselor Troi begins to hear the music (without having heard it in person) from the box … Read more
The Auditory Imagery of Great Composers
A note of Tchaikovsky’s musical imagination stopping him from sleeping as a child. Agnew, M. (1922). The auditory imagery of great composers. Psychological Monographs, 31, 279-287. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093171
The Big Bang Theory
Sheldon feels like he is descending into madness because he cannot remember the name of the song that is stuck in his head
The Imp of the Perverse
In Edgar Allen Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse (1845), the narrator is a murderer who has succumbed to influences he tried to repress. In discussing what led him to murder, he considers the nature of things you shouldn’t do and thoughts you shouldn’t have and how to respond to them, using unwanted inner music … Read more
The Song That Doesn’t End
Performed by Shari Lewis, American ventriloquist and puppeteer, 1992.
The Ultimate Melody
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1957 science fiction short story The Ultimate Melody, a scientist, Gilbert Lister, develops the ultimate melody – one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. As the storyteller, Harry Purvis, explains, Lister theorised that a great melody “made its impression on the mind because … Read more
Touching the Void
Touching the Void is a 1988 book by Joe Simpson, recounting his and Simon Yates’s near fatal descent after climbing the 6,344-metre peak Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Within it, he describes being delirious after a climbing accident and has a negative experience imagining Boney M’s ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.
Wakefield
Wakefield. Directed Kristen Dunphy. 2021. The show’s protagonist, Nik, is a psychiatric nurse at a hospital near Sydney Australia undergoing a mental health crisis. He frequently has ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners stuck in his head. This appears to both trigger and be associated with the mental health episodes and/or breaks from reality.