Organ music
A very interesting article about musical hallucinations (‘An Ear for Music’, FT361:22). For some years, my wife has complained of experiencing a type of tinnitus that manifests as organ music. She was for many years a member of the excellent St George’s Beckenham Church choir, so it made me wonder if this was a case of the brain struggling to make sense of random noise produced in tinnitus and re-interpreting it as music, in this case, very familiar to my wife from her days as a chorister. She says that there is no recognisable tune to what she hears now, only short phrases from scales – but she definitely identifies the instrument she hears as being a church organ. I am surmising that once the brain ‘decides’ upon an interpretation, that interpretation gets ‘locked in’, producing the maddening ‘earworm’. In any case, I was able to direct her towards the article, and she found it both fascinating in itself, and of some relief to know that others were having the same rather weird experience. So – thank you! Anthony Wilkins Ripponden, West Yorkshire