Auditory Imagery Quotes

Professional musicians, in general, possess what most of us would regard as remarkable powers of musical imagery. Many composers, indeed, do not compose initially or entirely at an instrument but in their minds. There is no more extraordinary example of this than Beethoven, who continued to compose (and whose compositions rose to greater and greater heights) years after he had become totally deaf. It is possible that his musical imagery was even intensified by deafness, for with the removal of normal auditory input, the auditory cortex may become hypersensitive, with heightened powers of musical imagery (and sometimes even auditory hallucinations).

Physiological confirmation of such “filling in” by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory cortex while their subjects listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replaced by gaps of silence. The silent gaps embedded in familiar songs were not consciously noticed by their subjects, but the researchers observed that these gaps “induced greater activation in the auditory association areas than did silent gaps embedded in unknown songs; this was true for gaps in songs with lyrics and without lyrics.

I found that visual and auditory imagery of the elements in nature consistently induced in people's experience the qualities of consciousness associated with the elements in the alchemical and other earth-based traditions: Images and sounds of air and winds, of clouds and winged creatures, triggered associations of the mental realm, the expansive and swiftly changing world of thoughts and ideas, of words and poems and songs. Images and sounds of the water element, of oceans, tides, sea creatures, waves, rivers, springs, lakes, and rain, often released powerful emotions and feeling memories, both positive and negative. Images and sounds of fire energy, such as the sun, lightning, volcanoes, and electrical fields, were associated in people's experience with creativity, imagination, enthusiasm, vision, and intuition. Images and sounds of the earth element, of rocks and mountains, land and forest, plants and minerals, induced associations of kinesthetic and somatic awareness, of sensory contact and pleasure, of solid and substantive form.