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Stainton-Moses, William - Proceedings SPR - Hearing Musical sounds
Identifier
023478
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
A casebook of otherworldly music – D Scott Rogo
For -many years, hidden within Moses's private notebooks were several references to musical sounds. These came to light when F. W. H Myers published them in a two-part study, “The Experiences of W. Stainton Moses." (Proceedings S.P.R., Volume IX, part XXXV, and Volume XI, Part XXXVII ). Moses wrote of the psychic interplay of two stringed instruments (Proceedings IX, page 281).
They represented two instruments, the one of three, the other of seven strings, and they were used to playing thus: -Certain notes were sounded upon the three strings, and these were followed by a run made as if by running a finger nail rapidly over the strings of the other instruments. The result was like what musical cognoscenti call “a free prelude," what I should describe as a series of high notes, highly-pitched, clear and of lower pitch. I speak of instruments but . . . there was in the room . . an ordinary dining room . . . no musical instruments of any kind whatever.
Dr. Speer also recounted hearing plucked notes (Proceedings IX, page 281) and goes on to give a description of a different musical phenomenon (page 297).
. . . imagine the soft tone of a clarinet gradually increasing in intensity until it rivalled the sound of a trumpet, then by degrees diminishing to the original subdued note of the clarinet, until it eventually died away as a long drawn-out melancholy wail.
Moses himself classified the sounds into nine categories (Proceedings, XI, page 54): thick harp string, Egyptian four-stringed harp, hree-stringed lyre, seven-stringed lyre, drum roll, ringing of porcelain, high strings of a harp, tambourine, and flapping sounds.