Musical Hallucinations

Abstract

In 1846, the French alienist Jules Baillarger (1806–1891) published the first known medical account of musical hallucinations. Since then, no more than 150 studies on the subject have been published in the international literature, most of them involving case reports. Although the past century saw ten large epidemiological surveys of hallucinations in the general population, yielding prevalence rates for auditory hallucinations of around 4%, none of them discriminated between various types of auditory hallucination. As a consequence, it is not possible to extract any prevalence figures for musical hallucinations from them. This state of affairs would seem to reflect – and perhaps also sustain – the long-held opinion that musical hallucinations are rare, and for the most part irrelevant from a clinical point of view. And yet, working over the past 50 years with elderly patients living in hospitals and nursing homes, and in neurology clinics for patients with migraine, epilepsy, movement disorders, sleep disorders, and other conditions, I have been given many accounts of musical hallucinations from my patients (the first person in this chapter will refer to one of the authors, O.S.). After 1985, when I published case histories of two such patients in my book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, many readers wrote to me about their own musical hallucinations. I have thus had contact, in person or via correspondence, with hundreds of patients with musical hallucinations, and certain trends emerge from their accounts.