103647/Z/14/Z: Heard Voices: Musical Hauntings

Project Summary:Heard Voices: Musical Hauntings is a musical work populated by voices and songs humorous and poignant, whimsical and disturbing. As a performance piece, it is atmospheric, engaging and thought-provoking. And as a piece of science in action, it reveals some of the processes by which we hear, remember and recall music. Heard Voices: Musical Hauntings develops two established strands of research (both supported by the Wellcome Trust): Hearing the Voice (led by Charles Fernyhough), which has been exploring the ways in which inner speech is externalised in the form of hallucinatory voices; and Tales from Babel (led by Edward Wickham and Christopher Fox) which engages with the science of hearing text in music and words sung or spoken against background noise. In this new project, we intend to express the experience of auditory musical hallucinations in the form of an hour-long musical work which develops from a series of musical 'hauntings' - fragments of songs, half-remembered and i mperfectly recalled, presented in ways which reflect the operation of our musical and auditory memory and the intrusions from memory that happen in voice-hearing. The work will draw on and reflect the experiences both of the voice-hearing community, gathered via channels already established by Hearing the Voice, and of those who report musical hallucinations. These experiences will feed into the performed work. and thereby engage a different type of audience with classical vocal and contempo rary, experimental music.

Grant Holder:Dr Edward Wickham

Organisation:The Clerks

Financial Year:2013/2014