Abstract
You already know about the acoustic imaginary. If you have ever had a tune stuck in your head (an “earworm”) or have recalled the sound of someone’s voice or of a particular place, or have mistakenly thought you heard something in your immediate environment, then you have experienced the faculty of imagined hearing. Theorists and psychologists have given this phenomenon a variety of names, but there is broad consensus about its meaning: some sounds we only think we hear; they exist not in the phenomenal world but in the “mind’s ear.”1 This does not necessarily make them any less real. Most of the same areas of the brain activate when we hear a sound imaginatively as when we hear “actual” sound.2
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Notes
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© 2014 Adrian Curtin
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Curtin, A. (2014). The Acoustic Imaginary. In: Avant-Garde Theatre Sound. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324795_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324795_2
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