![]() ![]() Shaili Jain, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, found auditory hallucinations among the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. The night before, many of us had attended the premiere of “Visitations,” a double bill of one-act operas about auditory hallucinations by Jonathan Berger, a composer and Stanford professor, at the university’s Bing Concert Hall. Deutsch was the first speaker at a one-day symposium on auditory hallucinations, and already I was hearing things that weren’t there. Before exams many are likely to hear “no brain.” Numbers of female students report hearing the words “love” and “Diet Coke.” When she plays them to large groups of students at the University of California at San Diego, where she teaches, and asks them to record what they hear, she said, a lot can be told about what’s going on in their lives. Diana Deutsch, the psychologist who had designed this aural brainteaser and used it to open her talk here at a symposium, Hearing Voices, had recorded merely the words “high” and “low,” playing them from the two speakers offset, so that the left emits one word and the right, the other. Except not only was there no rainbow, but the recorded sounds that had entered my ears also contained none of the words I was “hearing” so clearly. ![]() Then it changed tack: “Window - window - where’s the window - where’s the rainbow - where’s the rainbow.” After a few seconds, a voice with zero inflection but crisp diction seemed to emerge out of the bleeps, barking at me, “Wake up - wake up - wake up - wake up,” over and over, steady as a metronome. Sets of loudspeakers positioned on either side of the room emitted a repetitive pattern of phonemes that were so short as to resemble brief electronic bleeps. The performance space of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University was filled to capacity on a recent Saturday morning, the blinds drawn against the optimistic California sunshine. ![]()
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