SOUNDS AND VISIONS
Techie gets dosed by a 50-year-old synth, plus the people who hear voices and other auditory hallucinations
A TRIP THROUGH TIME
At the helm of KPIX Television, Broadcast Operations Manager Eliot Curtis tackles all sorts of technical problems to keep Channel 5 on the air. Late last year, he volunteered to fix a vintage “analog music modular instrument” owned by the music department at Cal State University East Bay. The instrument – commonly known today as a synthesizer – was commissioned by Professors Glenn Glasow and Robert Basart, leading avant-garde musicians who taught in the music department in the 1960s, when Cal State East Bay was known as Cal State Hayward. The device eventually fell out of favour and was stored for decades in a cool, dark cupboard in the corner of a classroom.
At some point, it was augmented with additional modules, including a redcoloured module on the top row. During his repair work, Curtis opened the module and saw something stuck under a knob. “There was like a residue… a crust or a crystalline residue on it,” he said. He sprayed a cleaning solvent on it and started to push the dissolving crystal with his finger as he attempted to dislodge it and clean the area. About 45 minutes later, he began to feel a weird, tingling sensation. It was the initial phase of an acid trip, which lasted roughly nine hours. Three separate chemical tests identified the substance as LSD (or Delysid, the original Sandoz trade name, which for some reason didn’t catch on, unlike Bayer’s ‘Heroin’). The drug can remain potent for decades if kept in a cool, dark place and can be ingested through the skin. No one knows whether the acid was intentionally stashed inside the red module or an accidental spill resulted in the drug seeping through to the circuitry.
It transpired the instrument was a Buchla 100 series modular synthesizer, created by the late Don Buchla of Berkeley, “the Leonardo Da Vinci of electronic music design,” according to electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, the “Diva of the Diode”. In 1966, some Buchla modules ended up on the Merry
It was the initial phase of an acid trip which lasted about nine hours
Prankster bus purchased by Ken Kesey. During the last of Kesey’s acid tests at Winterland on Hallowe’en in 1966, electronic sounds, possibly from the Buchla, appeared to interrupt an interview of Kesey. Buchla was friends with Owsley Stanley (‘Bear’), the genius behind the Grateful Dead’s sound system, famous for making the purest acid ever to hit the street.
After his strange trip, Curtis – wearing gloves – finished repairing the vintage Buchla. The instrument is now back at Cal State East Bay and ready for music students to explore. The device has no keyboard and is played by turning knobs and patching cords. [CBS] 21 May 2019.
HEAR HEAR
A 69-year-old woman who has endured musical hallucinations for over a decade participated in an academic study into the little-understood condition. It began after Sylvia, a maths teacher and keen amateur keyboard player, developed severe tinnitus and loss of hearing. At first she heard a simple repetition of two notes as if played on a piano. This increased in complexity to become fragmentary tunes, “always in a minor key and therefore a bit depressing”. She was able to transcribe the melodies using musical notation. The condition progressed and Sylvia began to recognise phrases from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore and music by Bach. She then noticed that she could alter the pattern of these aural hallucinations by playing music herself. The 2014 study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine brain activity and found that areas of the brain normally involved in the processing of melodies and retrieval of musical memories were particularly active when the hallucinations were heard. Sylvia has no history of verbal hallucinations, nor any neurological or psychiatric disorder.
A more frequently recorded condition of auditory hallucination is that of hearing voices, typically thought of as an indication of schizophrenia. Studies have found that as many as one in 20 people regularly hear voices, many of whom have never been diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder and do not require any treatment.
Peter Bullimore, 52, a trustee of the Hearing Voices Network (the coordinating body for over 180 support groups worldwide) has been hearing voices for over 30 years. At first, he recalled, it was a frightening experience; he was prescribed antipsychotic medication which had no effect. Gradually he came to accept his voices, and says: “I wouldn’t want to be without [them] because I think they are guides in their own way”.
‘Hearing the Voice’, a research project conducted by Durham University, aims to better understand the condition. “Many people think that voice hearing is just a symptom of severe mental illness like schizophrenia or psychosis, but what they don’t know is that hearing voices is also an important part of many ordinary people’s lives,” said project director Professor Charles Fernyhough. Co-director Dr Angela Woods argues that while public perception regards hallucinatory voices only as abusive, threatening, or commanding, some voices “can be kind and encouraging, providing a person with an important source of comfort and support”.
Why some people hear voices is still unclear. One theory proposed by the project is that inner speech or dialogue may sometimes be mistakenly attributed to an external source. Most participants described their voices as having an ‘alien’ quality, as if not emanating from the self. If the statements are derogatory, the person may say, “I would never think that”.
Some famous persons said to have been voice hearers include Socrates, Joan of Arc, Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud and Mahatma Gandhi, suggesting a potential link with creativity and original thought. Dr Julian Jaynes’s controversial Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) argued that as recently as 3,000 years ago, the human brain was split, so that the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere were transmitted to the left hemisphere and experienced as auditory hallucinations. Metro, 12 Nov 2013; (Dundee) Courier and Advertiser, 27 Jan 2014; S Kumar, W Sedley, GR Barnes, S Teki, KJ Firston, TD Griffiths (2014): ‘A brain basis for musical hallucinations’ Cortex vol.52, pp86-97: http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.cortex.2013.12.002 Christopher Josiffe