“There’s a moment at the end of ‘Theotokia,’ the moment of greatest percussion, when the protagonist has his moment of greatest clarity, and the voices stop,” he continued. “So that’s why I think treats it well, and scientifically, but he humanizes it as well. Norman Adler, a professor of psychology at Yeshiva University who studies abnormal psychology and the origins of religious belief and practice, agreed that the line between “normal” and “abnormal” isn’t so clear. “If we image the brain thinking of a particular sound, the activation in the brain that happens in those regions that activate when you’re actually listening to the sound are exactly the same.” “The interesting research question here is, what’s normal and what’s abnormal when we imagine sound?” said Berger. Short of virtual reality, “Visitations” might be as close as one who has not felt it can get to living that experience. It’s one thing to observe prosaically that hallucinations are “all in your head.” It’s quite another to inhabit the head of someone afflicted by these events. The greatest strength of “The War Reporter,” and of “Visitations” as a whole, is that the audience is not permitted to be distanced from the protagonist’s experience. Based on interviews conducted with Paul Watson by librettist Dan O’Brien, as well as Berger’s conversations with psychiatrists who work with patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, the work does not pull any punches in conveying the intensity and immediacy of Watson’s anguish. “The War Reporter” does not employ sonification, but focuses instead on how trauma can trigger hallucinations. This is a technique called “sonification”- the use of audio to render data. This review will examine the presentation of auditory hallucinations across the life span, as well as in various clinical groups. This is the most common type of hallucination for dementia patients, although people with delirium (disturbance of consciousness) also experience it. In other words, if listeners were to visualize the music by where it plays in space, it would map, successively, to the regions of the brain that scientists would find activated in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Visual hallucinations include seeing people, lights or patterns that no one else can spot. Even the placement of speakers in the auditorium help the audience experience the spatial manifestation of electrical activity in the schizophrenic brain-a feat Berger accomplished with the use of full-sphere surround sound. The timing of the music-the way it hits, builds, and recedes-mirrors the timing of the onset of musical and auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. “Theotokia” reflects the particulars of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia in its score.
These operas are striking, not only for the command performances given by those involved, but also for the scientific accuracy of Berger’s artistic choices.
0 kommentar(er)
