Hallucination as a tangible representation of layered reality

Practise Research

Jan 2024

When it comes to the nature of reality, auditory perception is as elusive as it is revealing. That two people can perceive the same environment or ‘sense data’ (Millar, 2019, p.46) completely, or even subtly differently throws up a great deal of questions regarding the nature of perception and reality. What does it mean to perceive something that is generally considered not real? And can experiences of sound outside of consensus reality broaden the horizons of what is considered real? God is sending me pop songs is a sound installation that considers these questions by layering first-hand accounts of a diverse range of auditory hallucinations into an interactive sonic structure that replicates my own auditory hallucinations. It bears saying that I am focusing on nonpsychiatric hallucinatory experience and other related instances of aural diversity in this project. I am interested in exploring expanded layers of perception and what they mean philosophically and poetically. My installation aims to represent and validate perceptions of sound beyond consensus reality where the hallucinations are real because they are perceived, and not the other way around. It is a creative work that explores how aural diversity can be a tangible indicator of a multiplicitous reality.

Often, when I am falling asleep, I hear things that I know are not there. These auditory hallucinations take on a few different forms; people saying my name, many voices talking at once with no distinguishable words, loud generic jazz, or just overwhelming static noise. I know these sounds are not worldly, nor are they consciously conjured, yet I can hear them. Occasionally these sounds get so overpowering and distressing that I have to sit up and ground myself to make them go away- sometimes repeatedly- in order to fall asleep. Recently, a friend of mine began to hear severely anxiety inducing sounds and voices that no one else could hear. I found myself reluctant, indeed unable, to dismiss their experience as ‘not real’. It was clearly real to them. These experiences with sound outside of consensus reality reinforced and reified my belief that reality is not fixed and singular, but layered and multiple. I wanted to find a way to represent this layered reality in my practise, with my initial desire being to recreate the many voices I hear when falling asleep. For the content of these recordings, I thought it would be pertinent to interview people who have experienced auditory hallucinations so that the piece itself layered realities. By then putting these recordings in a surround sound speaker set up, I could create not only an immersive experience, but an interactive one. Audience members could walk up to speakers and hear different firsthand accounts of auditory hallucinations, and by also slowly moving these recordings around the room, sound perception could be shifted both internally and externally.

Interactive Sound Art

As my installation can be set up just about anywhere, I am reluctant to call it a sound installation as it does not interact with acoustics of a specific space (LaBelle, 2015, p. viii). It is closer to the fine art definition of an installation, which ‘create[s] a space and an experience that has an immersive relationship with the viewer’ and centres ‘the viewer’s bodily participation with elements of the work’ (Dadi, 2021, p. 106). However, as my installation is rooted in sound, I consider it to be sound art but its interactive element renders it outside the realm of traditional surround sound composition. Because of this, I will refer to God is sending me pop songs as both an installation and a piece of interactive sound art.

In a similar way, Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet utilises 40 speakers arranged in an oval to create an immersive and interactive realisation of Thomas Thalis’ Spem in Alium (Cardiff, 2001). By placing one harmony in each speaker, audiences are able not only to be situated in the centre of the chorus, but can also walk up to speakers and experience the harmonies in a way they could not with real singers present (Tate, 2018).  Another example of a non-site-specific interactive sound art piece is Chisato Minamimura and Dave Packer’s Sound Moves. The ‘portable interactive movement installation’ was designed accessibly for a diverse audience and converts the audience member’s sound and movements into light animations (Minamimura, 2017). Reactive light animations are also a key feature of multi-platform project Dreamachine, which was created collaboratively by Jon Hopkins, Assemble (Turner prize winners), scientists, philosophers and technologists. Primarily, the concept was realised as an seated, multisensory, immersive surround sound and light installation which would create hallucinations unique to each individual audience member, whilst also remaining a collective experience (Dreamachine, 2022a). It has since branched off into an unfurling of iterations, from private viewings of different version of the installation, to a perception census, to an online gallery of drawings by audience members (Dreamachine, 2022b). This year, Dreamachine will begin touring.

My installation was created using Dolby Atmos and I received invaluable help from sound technician, Jake Reynolds, in using the software and getting the not-quite-up-and-running EMS installation room working. By cutting out the names of participants and laying them out in a circle on the floor, I found a way to pan the voices so that each of the 7 voices spent time in each of the 7 speakers (I did not use the ceiling speakers or subwoofer) and each voice never moved more than 2 speakers away. Once I had worked out the pattern, I was able to repeat this for every move and map it onto the panning envelopes. I mapped each voice to stay in a speaker for 30 seconds and spend 15 seconds moving to the next one. Each interview was edited to be 12 minutes and 15 seconds which meant I could seamlessly loop the project file.

Figure 1: Project file showing the panning envelopes

In the future, I would like to better utilise Dolby Atmos and surround sound technology to create a more sophisticated spatial version of this project. If I can situate voices at specific points in the space, and not just near the speakers, the audience experience should become more immersive and disorienting. I will also be able to include more interviews without the need for more speakers than are in a standard surround sound speaker set up. I would also like to realise a VR iteration of the project that utilizes video game software, such as Unreal Engine or Mozilla Hubs. Examples of other VR interactive sound art are Loula Yorke’s Garden of Bloop, a fantasy world with singing flowers (Yorke, 2021), or Sami El-Enani and David Denyer’s no visuals video game, Deadly Structures, where the player must navigate and complete challenges in an eerie world using only sound (El-Enani and Denyer, 2021).

Philosophy of Perception

In discussions of the Philosophy of Perception, hallucination is often treated as an experiential object with which one can counter an argument, particularly by those advocating Indirect Realism over Direct Realism, or a mind independent world over a mind dependant one. So often has ‘the argument from hallucination’ been discussed in this context that it ‘has come to be called the problem of perception’ (Sethi, 2020, p. 659). Hallucinations discussed are largely visual in nature (Millar, 2019, p. 50); little thought is given to the many types of hallucinations and their degrees of interaction with consensus reality. Jean-Paul Sartre even goes so far as to  say ‘auditory hallucination is accompanied by a provisional collapse of perception but when the hallucinatory attack has passed, the world reappears’ (2004, p. 151). Direct realism posits that ‘our perception of mind independent things is routinely direct’, meaning that what we perceive is not distinct from the thing itself (Millar, 2019, p.44). Contrarily, indirect realism argues that perceiving something aways involves ‘an indirect apprehension of something other than anything which you are directly apprehending’, meaning that all experience of the mind independent world is mediated through our sense of it- so what we directly perceive are ideas of things, not the things themselves (Moore, 1953, p. 85).  

These traditional debates within the philosophy of perception seemingly seek to draw a clear line between mind and external world (with Internalism arguing that there is only mind (Noë, 2004, p. 213)). Maurice Merleau-Ponty problematises this mind-oriented notion of by theorising a body-centric approach to perception. ‘We are in the world through our body’, he says, and our understanding of the world is mediated through our bodily experience (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, pp. 239, 235). In bringing the body into the discourse around perception, Merleau-Ponty reifies a previously intellectualised perceptual world concealed ‘beneath all the sediment of knowledge’ (2004, p. 93). Indeed, hallucination is a part of bodily experience in that it is perceived, shapes relationship to world, and effects feelings in the body. Lisbeth Lipari highlights the bodily effects of sound through an exercise in which she asks her University students to pay attention to their physical responses to sound effects. The students recounted ‘clenching their teeth, tightening their stomachs, relaxing their shoulders, [and] feeling a tingling in their hair’ (Lipari, 2014, p. 55). 

She developed this and other such listening exercises after Don Ihde’s ‘listening phenomenologically’, which encourages an awareness of the beliefs and biases that arise during reduced listening (ibid., p.54). Ihde seeks to blur the line between mind and the external world set up by traditional philosophy of perception. When imaginative awareness and perceptual awareness synthesize, he posits, ‘a very ordinary “hallucination” occurs’ (Ihde, 2007, p. 126). He gives the example of the commuter who is able to focus on the road at the same time as mentally planning his day, describing this as a ‘momentary synthesis of “inner-outer”’ (ibid, p. 127).

An Anthropological Approach

Tim Ingold highlights the importance of addressing ‘big philosophical questions’ by talking to people in order to situate study in the world, thus taking on a more anthropological approach (Holliday, 2023, 00:12:30). This, he says, is ‘not a way of making studies of people, but a studying with people’ (Holliday, 2023, 00:13:00). Sound artist, afromerm (AKA cil), brings this to fruition in her multichannel work, Triangular Sound: Auditory Memories of Windrush which blends interviews from ‘6 Windrush descendants from 3 generations in[to] a 3 channel spatial sound installation’ (Lane, 2023, 23:30). The result combines her individual experience with a collective one on both an emotional and informative level. Minamimura, a Deaf multimedia artist, tells the untold stories of Deaf survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb in her piece, Scored in Silence (Minamimura, 2018). She incorporates her research of these survivors’ firsthand accounts and uses them as the basis for her multimedia performance. The result provides ‘new ways for all to experience and understand and learn lessons from the nuclear A-Bomb onslaught’ (ibid.).

Truly, it was through setting up interviews and having conversations about auditory hallucinations that I learned the most. I officially interviewed 7 people but heard many more casual accounts of auditory hallucinations in everyday conversations. Collecting these accounts revealed to me how varied, nuanced and common these experiences can be. Full hallucinations are defined by the NHS as instances where someone hears a sound that is to them unquestionably real, but is not heard by anyone else (NHS, 2022). For example, music psychologist Diana Deutsch describes several testimonies of people who have hallucinated music and gone to great lengths to find the source (2019, p. 129). Several of the people I interviewed had experiences of full auditory hallucinations, such as regularly hearing a relative crying in another room, hallucinated conversations in a fever state, or hearing their name called when hoovering (anonymous interview, 2023).

Both Real and Not Real: the space between full hallucination and consensus reality

However, the waters of definition become a great deal murkier once we move beyond the fairly digestible idea of a full hallucination. Oliver Sacks, in his book Hallucinations, talks about the overlap between pseudo hallucinations, complex misperceptions and illusions, and how ‘the line between these is difficult to draw’ (2012, p. xi). For ease of discussion I will use the term ‘half hallucinations’ to refer to occurrences where a person knows they are hallucinating. This is most common in the form of hypnagogic hallucinations which happen when falling asleep (Deutsch, 2019, p. 133). Deutsch shares two separate accounts of hypnagogic hallucinations where people heard cacophonous jazz as they were falling asleep, which matched my own hallucinatory experience (2019, p. 134). One of my interviewees described hearing whispering when they were stressed, tired and/or overstimulated. Enacting a similar process to Lipari’s students, they explained were able to sit back and really listen to the sound, deconstructing, acknowledging and processing the strangeness of the experience (anonymous interview, 2023). Another interviewee who was able to observe their own half hallucinations recounted going through a phase of trying to conjure them at will (anonymous interview, 2023).

As the interviews were being used for a creative work rather than scientific data collection, I was not too concerned with having a wide and diverse pool of interviewees. My research was rather more qualitative, which afforded me the capacity for ‘small scale everyday ethics’ (Lichtner, 2014, p. 817). Although I made sure none of the people I interviewed were currently experiencing psychiatric hallucinations, I was very aware of the sensitive nature of our discussion. Consequently, I anonymised all of the interviews and gave participants the option to have their voices pitch shifted for further anonymity. I made it clear both in the consent form (which had to be signed before the interview took place) and in person that they did not have to talk about anything they didn’t want to, and I tried to create a safe space to that end. The consent form also detailed their right to withdraw up until a certain date. Once I had edited the interviews, I sent them to the participants for them to review so I could take out anything that made them feel uncomfortable. My interview questions were as follows:

-          Can you tell me about an experience where you perceived sound differently to those around you, or had an auditory hallucination?

-          How much control did you have over the sound?

-          How did this sound influence your perception of reality?

-          How did this sound influence your relationship to the physical world around you?

-          How did this sound differ from other sounds in your head?,

These questions served as a loose frame for our conversation, provided a fruitful jumping off point for a discussion around hallucination, reality, internal worlds and external worlds. All interviewees used the terms ‘real’ and ‘not real’, with the word ‘fake’ only coming up once. Perhaps the term ‘not real’ is less committal, and thus inserts a degree of ambiguity- Matthew Ratcliffe uses the term ‘unreality’ (2017, p.44). Indeed, further discussions revealed all interviewees considered their hallucinations, whether full or half, to be real experiences, if only to themselves. Ultimately, auditory hallucinations seemed to be both simultaneously real and not real for my interviewees.

In their philosophical theory of Agential Realism, Karan Barad, makes the argument that phenomena, which are ‘the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies’, are ‘constitutive of reality’ (2007, p. 206). Intra-action is distinct from ‘the usual ‘‘interaction,’’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction’; instead ‘the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (Barad, 2007, p. 33). Thus, concludes Barad, ‘Reality is an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity’ (2007, p. 206). Using Barad’s concept of intra-action provides a creative and profound reframing of what we consider to be real. We can use it to rethink instances of hallucination not as unreal or separate, but as an expanded reality formed of an intra-action between internal worlds and the external world (or consensus reality).

Collectivising Lonely Experiences

In this reconsideration, auditory hallucination becomes in theory less isolated. Experientially though, the lack of ‘consensual validation’ can be startling (Sacks, 2012, p. x). As Ratcliffe explains, ‘interpersonal interactions shape our wider experiences of the world’, and we routinely influence one another’s perceptual experiences (2017, p. 140, 144). So the ‘lack of interpersonal validation’ (Ratcliffe, 2017, p. 151) in hallucination can lead to a very lonely experience and one that is kept quiet for fear of being considered crazy (Sacks, 2012, p. xiv). In conducting my interviews and casual conversations, many people expressed relief and interest that they were not alone, as well as a willingness to talk about their experiences in a judgement free zone. One participant told me they had never spoken about it in such detail before and it was nice to talk about it in a more neutral way (anonymous interview, 2023).

Other more common experiences of sound outside of consensus reality came up in my interviews including misophonia and tinnitus. Misophonia can have dire effects on interpersonal relationships (Baguley, 2023, p. 19). Tinnitus, which can be considered an auditory hallucination, also causes a ‘heightened sense of isolation’ for many people who live with it (Farmer, 2023, p. 83). Dr Marie Thompson and Dr Patrick Farmer bring this isolating experience into a collective one through their project Tinnitus, Auditory Knowledge and the Arts (Farmer and Thompson, 2021). The fruits of the project are an exhibition (by Fern Thomas and Nina Thomas), a series of online workshops (by Thompson and Farmer) and a collection of useful resources. Thomas and Thomas’ multimedia exhibition, The Hidden Noise: Tinnitus and Art, aimed to ‘raise awareness of this frequently ‘hidden’ auditory phenomenon’ (ibid). It also included works by participants of Thomspon and Farmers workshop which asked participants to respond to 6 artistic prompts exploring questions around sharing and understanding experiences of tinnitus, and the benefits this can have for people in the tinnitus community (ibid). A workshop report concluded that the art exercises were on the whole successful in prompting more realistic and relatable portrayals of tinnitus which lead to a greater sense of community and understanding around a highly internal experience (Thompson, 2022, p. 6). 

Minamimura’s afore mentioned piece, Scored in Silence, uses technology to provide not just a more accessible performance but a deeper sensory experience. Woojer™ vibration straps are given to audience members to add a tactile element and Holo-Gauze™ projection allows animation to interact with Minamimura’s mimed performance (2018). By using visual and vibrational technology, Minamimura is able to artistically portray the Deaf experience of an earth shatteringly loud historical event, thus giving voice to a marginalised experience (ibid.).

Conclusion

Similar to these projects, my installation aims to collectivise and represent what can be a very isolating experience of hallucination. When I interviewed people after the installation I received a lot of positive feedback from people who found comfort in hearing about other people’s experiences; ‘it’s nice to have it framed in a way that’s not like “check this fucked up shit out”… this is something that a lot of people go through’ (accompanying video, 08:55). Many people found the initial babble of voices to be overwhelming, which represents a common facet of auditory hallucinatory experience. Going up to the speakers afforded people the agency to shift their sound perspective to a more localised space and hear different accounts of auditory hallucinations. As the voices moved around the room, their perspective would be changed externally, with a brief moment of no clear voices, resulting in a disorienting experience outside of their control, much like auditory hallucinations. As well as this emotional representation, the fragments of experiences that people could hear served to give voice to an almost taboo subject and platform accounts of diverse experiences. God is sending me pop songs presents auditory hallucinations and other sound-outside-of-consensus-reality as valid and real perceptual experiences. Shared reality, then, can be seen as not just limited to consensus reality, but an intra-active weaving together of diverse sound experiences.

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