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Having said that, there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence that this did happen in your case. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to privately send me a list of the drugs you have been taking and I can give you a number of anecdotal reports of people in the same boat as you—losing hearing from taking those drugs. When only one person loses hearing from taking a drug, you put it down to coincidence. However, when you have numbers of people with the same results, you begin to see a trend. Bauman, I will likely post a comment describing my MES experience, now that I know what it is — this note is to extend my thanks to you for your in-depth replies here, and your offer to help the OR nurse with a drug interactions analysis.

The information you provide is much appreciated, and your human-ness — for lack of a better word — is exceptional and all too rare. It warms my heart, to put it plainly, and I am better for having found your work. Your generosity is a rare thing to find these days. For about 6 months now I have been hearing singing, christmas carols, songs from when I was a child, and other unnamed songs. In the past 6 I have fallen and hit my head pretty hard. First time I needed 13 staples in the back of my head.

Is it possible the hits on the head could be the cause of this? I am hard of hearing. I see a neurologist regularily for dizziness. It is possible as brain lesions can cause MES. The hit to your head could have caused some damage that healed up and left a scar or lesion. This may have resulted in your MES sounds. My first thought is that your ears have suffered acoustic trauma a sudden loud sound for example that has resulted in grossly distorted sound.

This can happen even without causing you any hearing loss. Is this what happened recently? As a musician and sound engineer, depending on how loud you listen to music, you could have damaged your ears this way too. However, every time you expose them to a loud sound, you can make it worse and have to start all over again. Think of a bruise. It takes time to heal, and if you whack it while it is healing it just takes longer and longer to heal. That is a good analogy to your ears healing from acoustic trauma. Bauman, thanks for your response! Listening to anything at high levels eventually damages your ears.

However, you have no control over the kind of damage it does. You may get hearing loss or tinnitus or distorted hearing or hyperacusis or all of these. Focus on protecting your ears from now on. I have been experiencing MES for about 2 years now. He took his life as well. I recently went to an inpatient treatment program for trauma victims. I had known I was hearing music, radio sounds and others like a train going by my apartment.

I think he was relieved als. I cannot be around loud noises and become extremely anxious around most people. I panic when someone knocks on the door because I will have to interact and I am not prepared or in control of the situation but it seems to getting easier very slowl. Thank you for this article. I was happy once again to read about what was happening to me. I recently moved to a new apartment and almost asked my downstairs neighbors if they listened to a radio in their bathroom in the morning.

The stress of this obviously has something to do with your hearing the phantom sounds. You need to continue to deal with your anxiety so you can get your life back to normal and not fear sounds, or worse things can happen. I hear music that I have been rehearsing with soloists for a coming event — both the piano music that I play and the singers. This is during the day especially when I am doing a study course by the internet, having to read a lot of the material on screen.

When I have to put the headphones on to listen to a video as part of the course, the other sounds go away. However, when I composed songs a few years ago, I woke up at night and heard the songs that I had written. And when it was sung by a group on stage, it had the same effect on them. It might help me concentrate on the study material!

I get answers to all my questions. I was tired last night and went to bed early. I am 88 years old and have had hearing loss over the last years but this would be Tinnitus, not MES, dammit. It has been with me for many years. I may have experienced the same sound in my teens, as well. I was concerned about ten years ago when I developed an occasional discharge of a liquid substance in my left ear.

When stretched out on my left side, I could feel it drip into my outer ear. Rolling over to the right side finds it dripping back into the ear canal. The substance would dry on the skin in my ear and then flake, like sunburned skin. I saw three different ENT men who were baffled by it. I wrote to a number of top ENT clinics around the U. Then I realized I was hearing chords. It is comforting to have learned about MES and Tinnitus. I mean, medicine can tell us so much.

Thank you all for your contributions! The only part of Musicophilia that has anything to do with Musical Ear Syndrome is Chapter 6 on musical hallucinations. The rest is unrelated. But Chapter 6 is quite interesting and follows much of what I have found to be true. I have just returned from visiting my father in hospital. He has significant hearing loss and has been admitted 3 times in 3 months in acute renal acidosis. During this last admission his BP dropped and he required inotropic support. He became acutely confused and his right face dropped. He made a good recovery until a week later yesterday he suddenly became confused again.

Today he was lucid but was crying about the music he was being tortured with. I am an ophthalmologist and with a bit of careful questioning I deduced that he was suffering from an auditory version of Charles bonnet syndrome. Now we just need to work out if he has had a stroke causing it or if it is due to the metabolic upset or both. So many people who read my Musical Ear Syndrome article tell me of the relief they feel when they realize they are not crazy, nor do they have some dreadful brain tumor. This makes it ever so much easier to bear. His MES could be from the stroke, any hearing loss he has, from any of a number of drugs that cause auditory hallucinations, etc.

I heard it start while feeding the baby. I am not hard of hearing and the sounds I hear are not familiar. Lack of understanding i guess or maybe i am crazy…thank you. There are some causes for hearing people to hear these MES sounds. Perhaps you are overtired. After all, it IS ;15 AM. It could be that there is a fan of some sort running. Good numbers of people find their brains try to make sense out of the fan noise—and make music out of it. Maybe there is a real, faint sound in the background that your brain is converting into the chime sounds you are hearing.

As the caregiver for my 91 year old mom, my husband and I freaked out when my mom became a raving maniac accusing us of lying to her about the noises she was hearing. She has hearing aids only wears them occasionally and this music started after she began a course of antidepressants. We went to the doctor and he took her off the meds indicating that if it was related to them, the music should go away in weeks. She is now very cognizant of the music and describes it as a man with a low voice singing operatic type music.

The aftermath is worse than the actual episode of hearing the music. You article has shed so much light on the issue and now we all recognize it as MES and try to be more patient with all of the other symptoms that can arise. I have been hearing musical sounds since I was a child. It never actually bothered me, as I was an only child. It only became evident that this is not normal, when I went to study music. None of my musical friends had the ability to hear music as I do. Often, while people are talking, my thoughts will catch a word in a conversation and the whole song related to this word, will play in the background, until my brain catches another phrase.

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I am not an expert, but I always thought this was because my mother stimulated me musically as a child, even in her womb. I could play the piano when I was four and played songs I heard on the radio easily by ear. Now at age 42, I have a name for my condition. I work alone a lot and I live alone with only my dogs.

My hearing is impaired, so the music in my head is at least comforting. I dislike being sociable as conversations with more than one person is very difficult to comprehend. So I will stick to my MES and be at peace! Also, if the answer above is MES, when you heard the music was there any real, constant background sound—perhaps a fan running, or a motor or something like that?

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Being a peace with your internal music is great. Can anybody remember an episode of starTrek when the crew would hearing audible whispering? Hi, Super interesting Article!! I am female and 20 years old. I am about to finish my music degree in Classical performance. This has happened before in other shows I have played in. When the music is playing in my head it is the whole ensemble playing, flute to percussion. I am not so much worried but more interested?

At the moment it is just annoying because it is interrupting my sleep- but I know it will probably go away after the show run finishes. From what you have explained, I do not think you have MES. That is not how people with MES would describe it. They HEAR it as coming from their ears. I really think you ave ear worms, not MES.

And as you say, it will likely go away when the show run is over and you are not so stressed over it. Hello, I am a semi retired musician. I worked as a studio musician in Los Angeles during the 60s- using head phones. In addition, i mad many rock and roll tours. As you would expect, I have a severe hearing loss with severe tinnitus. In my late forties I noticed the tinnitus. At that time I started suffering cluster headaches.

Every april through june. There was no relief for them. The ear nose and throat dr who diagnosed the headaches had a theory about clusters having something to do with biorhythms because of the reaccurance every spring, and the fact that I never got them when i was working in the studeo or during shows on stage. The minute I left the stage or the studio one would come on. At this same time, I started to have musical hallucinations; very vivid ones. Whole bands playing the same parts and rhythms over and over.

I talked to my doctor about it. He out me through all the tests for brain tumours and so forth. When I found out that it my brain reacting to stimuli or lack of it, I started playing around with it. I found that I could manipulate things to a point. I could slow the tempos down, or increase them. I could change the pitch. When I discovered that, what had been mostly bass and drum sounds became more like synthesizer sounds. I am 76 now. My headaches stopped 12 years ago and my whole tinnitus and musical hallucination thing changed.

Now I have a hotel room air-conditioner sound like a surround sound. Sparkly tiny bird sounds all over the spectrum. Like most people with this syndrome, the sounds ebb and flow, probably for all the reasons everyone cites in this blog. I, more than ever believer that. As I write this the mens voices have mostly subsided and ,not through any effort on mine, that has left the whooshing bare. I am fortunate in that I can keep my mind busy and block them out. I have found that concentration is my saviour in that respect. Losing myself in a book is like a sleeping pill.

Thanks for this wonderful blog. My doctor passed away in the 70s and I have always wanted to tell someone knowledgeable about my experiences. Once in a while, even during my youth, I had auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations — someone calling my name or a faint radio station sound. Sometimes the songs in my head are clear and distinct, although they seem distant, as well. There is a nightmarish quality to these bursts and they are, quite frankly, frightening. I have a mild anxiety reaction to them. Exploding head, Alice in Wonderland, sleep paralysis, night terrors.

My doctor has requested a neuro consult. Hi thank you so much for this information! I am now into my third night of MES with only managing 5 hours sleep in total of the 2 nights! Sooo loud and clear though! I tried moving rooms and still as loud and clear! Thank you for this information Neil! I want to know about treatment for MES.

I have had it for years along with hearing loss. This is greatly impacting my quality of life as I feel horrible all of the time. By evening I am just done and cannot go out. Where can I find treatment for this condition? There is no specific treatment for MES. They are outlined near the end of the above article. However, one of the important things is to not become emotionally involved with your MES. This just makes things worse. I have had phantom voices or music since I was a teen.

My Dad always watched the nightly news at 11 pm. I would be trying to sleep and I would flounce out to the living room and say it was too loud. I do the same thing with my hubby now too. I have always had sensitive ears and can pass an auditory test while sitting on the opposite side of the room, without the headphones, while someone else is being tested.

Would I fall into the MES category? What I think you are experiencing is a subset of MES called audio pareidolia where you actually hear some faint constant background sound and your brain turns it into music. You can read more about this phenomenon in my article on it at http: The following day I hear it again went searching for the source, only notice the volume level changed and what was playing changed. Not to mention voices and other sounds. How can it be disabled it? If you read this article, you already know the best ways to deal with your MES.

You just need to put them into practice. Thus you can only try the various suggestions and see if they help. The antibiotic may have brought on your phantom music, or it may have happened coincidentally at the same time. Otherwise you could really enjoy it. You might try listening to some real music via a bedside radio, MP3 player, etc and see if that helps you get to sleep in spite of the phantom choir.

First, your article made me realize I should get a hearing test. Third, I laughed out loud when you finally mentioned the myth of dental work channeling radio stations, as that HAD seemed my last hope for a sane explanation, prior to reading this. Or at least, should sudden lack of noise be considered a trigger since lack of auditory stimulation is listed as the first possible cause of MES? The last point No. I thought that would cover lack of sound, or am I not understanding what you are getting at? I appreciate this article.

Funny enough, the music is usually some kind of classic rock or pop, occasionally orchestral but not usually. I was starting to worry that this was stage one of something serious, but I can live with MES. And turn off the fan, haha. How do I help her?? Probably the best thing to do is read her, or have her read, my article on MES several times until it finally gets through to her that this is a common condition among elderly people and has nothing whatsoever to do with mental illness.

The hardest people to help are those that refuse to accept that these sounds are indeed phantom and not real. Bauman, Thank you so very much for this article information. I have mental illness issues—anxiety, depression, and Borderline personality disorder Yippee. I thought I was having psychiatric hallucination and was scared to tell anyone.

So, how do I go about being diagnosed with MES? Who do I talked to first? Or do you believe MES is something a person can diagnose on their own? Real sounds would be blocked out or be much softer. I am so glad I came across your article on MES. A few years ago, while my children and I were visiting my former mother-in-law, she told us that for some time she had been hearing many of the old hymns throughout the day, but that no one else seemed to be able to hear it. She was very happy about it, enjoying it thoroughly as she has severe hearing loss. I now know that she has MES. For myself, I have had several episodes of MES through the years but not on a regular basis, and at this point I am not too concerned about it.

Just moving my eyes or my head will make it occur; it does not usually occur while holding my head and eyes still. But it is driving me bonkers!! Thanks so much for any insights you might be able to give. Apart from your MES, you have an interesting form of somatosensory tinnitus called Gaze-evoked tinnitus where just moving your eyes side to side or up and down can cause tinnitus sounds. This can happen when your classical auditory nerve and non-classical other sensory nerves end up in your dorsal cochlear nucleus in your brain where certain neurons are multi-tasking and send the wrong signals to the wrong places.

I doubt your sinuses have anything to do with it but I could be wrong. More likely it is the result of tight muscles in your upper neck and face that are causing this. Hi Neil, After 5 years of being together my partner and myself had a conversation today regarding hearing music like a radio. Hence the reason I found this site. For about 8 years now I have heard music while in bed, and she has heard it for about 10 years.

Prior to us getting together she lived in a different part of the country to me. The odd thing is we both used to hear rock music and talking as if we could hear DJs. The odder thing is we now both hear classical music. Due to our conversation today, we discovered this. For the last 8 years I have slept with a fan on next to the bed. She previously did not. She asked her mother today who also said she hears music. Many years ago I used to attend a social club and often would hear radio coming from the speakers, despite them not being connected to any device that was switched on.

Do you not think there could simply be a connection between electrical appliances picking up the radio waves. As previously stated people with hearing aids etc. Your input would be of great interest. If so, you have MES. If not then it is a real sound, or an illusion.

See my article on this subject at http: If it is a real sound, then you should be able to track it down to its source as the volume will increase the closer you get to the source. I think it is possible that appliances can pick up radio waves and supposedly convert them to sound waves , but I think this is MOST unlikely. Just print out my article from the website and give it to her. Hello, I am so grateful to have found your article.

My 95 yr old mother tells me she has been hearing Irish music playing over and over and sometimes it seems like it is piped into her room. She does wear hearing aids during the day but hears the music then too. She lives alone in elderly housing with 4 apts. The music I hear always sounds like fast paced melodies, such as video games or action movies. We always have sound, from phones and YouTube to video games and earbuds playing music, music in the car.

It can be calming or beautiful; I wish I knew how to write it down like Mozart and make my fortune. But really, I do think it is my brain not knowing how to function in a quiet space because our world is so full of noise. Last night things came to a head when at 3. Thanks for your time. You are not to blame in the least—even though she thinks so. Does she have a adult child you can talk with? Thus, she may not be willing to read my article if you gave it to her, but you could still try. You might also try pushing the article anonymously under her door for her to read.

Maybe she will read it and maybe not. If she calls the police on you again, have a copy ready to hand them to read so the police know what she is experiencing and can act accordingly and leave you alone in the future. Finally, an answer to a worrisome question my brother and I had for our 85 year mother. She has been complaining to us that she hears the neighbors playing music over and over and over. We talked to the neighbors and of course they said no one plays any music out loud in the house, certainly not the music my mother says she hears. Patriotic music mostly and some of her favorite older songs that she used to love when she was younger.

My mothers hearing has really gotten bad. So, with the TV blaring and the radio playing in the other room and she can barely hear us talking to her sitting in the same room, she thinks she hears this music all the time. I am printing your article to give to her to read and it will ease her mind knowing that she is simply experiencing Musical Ear Syndrome.

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My first reaction is that this is not MES. Such unwanted memory repetitions are known as earworms—what you describe as echoic memory. I think this is a good term by the way—and is a more likely explanation. And no, you are not going crazy. This is so annoying… I can live with the T, but the sirens are just horrible. Tinnitus has many sounds. Tinnitus may be a ringing, roaring, rushing, rumbling, blowing, beating, banging, buzzing, clicking, chirping, clanging, drumming, fluttering, hissing, humming, pulsating, sizzling, whooshing, whistling or dreadful shrieking noise in our ears.

To some people, tinnitus sounds like crickets chirping, birds twittering, bees humming, clocks ticking, water rushing, machines clanking, bells ringing, owls hooting, jet engines roaring, glass breaking, radio static or chain saws running. I think your sirens would fall more under the above tinnitus sounds rather than MES. Probably, I should add sirens to the above tinnitus sounds. I wear hearing aids, am 70 years old, formerly had tinnitus, take lots of meds, and have had several falls. Hi, I am a 26 year old female that came across this article while googling possible causes for the sounds that I hear.

I have been experiencing them for about a year and I was beginning to think I was going crazy and was too afraid to even tell my husband! I hear the phantom noises nearly every night when I lay down. Sometimes it sounds like a radio station broadcaster. Other times it is simply music, that I have actually learned to enjoy. Also a little over a year ago I started experiencing random dizzy spells. They come a few at a time and only last a few seconds each.

I thought it was due to my new vegetarian diet, so I quit that but they never stopped. I wonder if they are linked in some way? The phantom sounds you are hearing are definitely the kinds of things you hear when you have Musical Ear Syndrome. Dizziness and MES are not linked as far as I know. Can you think of anything? Hi Dr, I have had similar experiences as these folks. This has been happening within the last three years. I am 32 years old, and first heard music from a small fan that was given to me by an elderly woman. After a few days of having the fan, I heard music coming from it.

I thought I was hearing things, until the second time when I grabbed my family member to hear. Sure enough, they heard the music, and were freaked out and told me to turn off the fan. I gave it to goodwill. The second time I heard music was one day in the midafternoon. I was getting ready for work and usually turn on the vent fan in the restroom. That day, I heard music from from the 40s, coming from the vent fan.

I stood on the toilet and sure enough, the music was in the vent. I turned off the vent, and the music stopped. I turned on the vent right away, and the music was still playing. I have heard the restroom vent fan music several times and learned to enjoy the music, as it is from the 40s, and I rarely listen to that type in reality.

The third thing I have heard a radio brodcaster voice from another time, the 40s coming from my fish tank cleaner. I do not hear the vent music anymore. The fish tank announcer from time to time, but it is all muffled. I can hear the tone, but not make out words. One last thing thats has recently been happening. If it is a high stress or pain, I can also feel that in my head as an electrical pain. If I am in close range to the person, my electrical pain in the head subsides when I look at the person, and or talk to them.

The intensity decreases or subsides. Other than all this, I am healthy. The fans you hear the music from are fooling your brain. Rather than MES, what you really have is audio pareidolia—where your brain takes a background sound and tries to make sense of it. I looked out Windows etc to see where it came from and it stopped. Came back into bed and continued until I fell back asleep. I later found that in the space of a week my mother and my grandmother also heard the music.

We do not live close nor had communicated our experiences until after we had all heard it. Why would this be? Two questions that come to mind are: Did you all hear the music at exactly the same time? Did you all hear exactly the same music? If so, that is one thing. Millions of people hear phantom music from time to time so it would not be unrealistic that all three of you happened to hear phantom music Musical Ear Syndrome.

However, if all three of you heard exactly the same music at exactly the same time, then I would not consider this to be coincidental. Nor would it likely be Musical Ear Syndrome. HI, thanks for the article. I just experienced this for the first time. I quite enjoy it actually.



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I have the flu and a high fever. Do you think that could be the cause? My ears do feel stuffy. I had some ringing in my ears for a few months and was catching myself trying to make sense of this outside music coming from two loud music venues now operating near my home. I have perfect pitch. It started with a brass band version of Battle Hymn of the Republic and I know get several other but can usually manipulate them into change when they get to me. If i concentrate on another activity or have actual music playing my brain will focus on that but any light activities will have something looping constantly now.

Thank you for this informative and reassuring article. My hearing loss was diagnosed about 5 years ago. They were creating almost a tickling sensation, like little wavelets of vibration, very clear and distinct. I felt the vibration in my arms and legs but mostly in the lower half of my trunk.

Suddenly the room was filled with intense white light and a magical silence; and along with it a tremendous vibratory energy. As I felt that energy and light, I saw him, my Twin Flame. He appeared at the end of my bed, bathed in light. I had not been in touch with this man for nearly 3 years but there he was; his body like a vehicle of radiant white light.

I could not make out his features but I recognised him instantly from the energy that he was emanating. It was as if he was transparent; the inside of him filled with a very intense, pure white light which was just breathtakingly and incredibly beautiful. The brightest part of the light was around his heart, bright as the sun; albeit smaller.

In fact, it was so bright that I raised my arm to cover my eyes but I could still see both him and the light. I smiled as I realised I was also filled with this light. From within me, I heard a voice say loud and clear: In an amazing powerful surge of energy, the kundalini shot through me along my spine, like a pulse of liquid fire. The energy surge shot out of my heart that then up the centre of my body, and then up toward the top of my head. I involuntarily arched my back, my body pulsating as intense waves of bliss came over me. It was so pleasurable that it was almost painful, like an ache, like a longing, a reaching out, a desire and vulnerability… like how I would feel perhaps all the time if I dropped all my defences and let myself go.

It felt wonderful, very alive and very real, and it jolted my inner core alive. We melded together, we were ONE. It felt like my whole being climax; not just physically although it felt like that too but literally MY WHOLE BEING, every single atom within every single cell within me, from my smallest toe to the deepest corners of my brain climaxed and it was pure bliss. I saw the interconnectedness and non-separation of everything, and I experienced myself as part of the ONE, swimming through a Universe of non-duality, emerging into the sublime, absolute realm of the divine.

I travelled through the Universe, seeing galaxies being created from within my own being, feeling the intense closeness of God. I knew that I was responsible for my own wholeness as the Love that I Am. As I woke up to a new day, I found that everything had changed: I was no longer just another soul swimming in the fish soup of humanity but rather a drop in the endless ocean called Universal consciousness, or a droplet of love vibrating in the heart of God. I realised that even though I was just a droplet within the greater whole, I was also one that contained All That Is within itself.

I had dreams and visions filled with meaning, especially with regards to my purpose on this planet and how this related to my twin flame. I discovered that I was able to do energetic healing and found myself in receipt of endless downloads of spiritual information which I spent hours writing down every day for almost a year. After that night, I also found that I could ask any question about creation, life, God — anything, and be answered immediately. It was a constant discourse with God, or, as I perceived it at the time, a higher intelligence.

Along with all this came an undeniable awareness of feeling another person — my Twin Flame — in the ether. He was there, on the inside, and I was sensing what he was sensing, feeling what he was feeling. He was part of my energetic make-up, and an undeniable part of me. At first I thought I was insane or that perhaps my sensory perception jumped up a few notches.

My mind was full of questions: The strangest thing was that at first when the energies started to flow I could not remember one thing about the time I had spent with him. What I did remember was looking into those intense blue eyes for the very first time and seeing my own soul, the timelessness of it all… I remembered what it felt like to have someone believe in me and accept me. I remembered how he always read my thoughts and knew me like no one else. How he was the only person to ever really understand me.

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Every day I tried not to think about it but memories kept resurfacing in my mind, returning to me as clear as if they happened only yesterday. I remembered how he told me I was his mirror image. I remembered that kiss on the forehead, then standing at the train station with him that first night, then kissing him on Pont des Arts, spending all those days and nights together, the laughter, the tears.. The following week I got chatting to a guy at work who had been there for a couple of months but that I had never spoken to. Little did I know this man would become an important part of this stage of our journey since a few months later he also found himself reunited with his twin flame after 20 years apart and struggled to accept her unconditional love, just as my Twin Flame struggled with accepting mine.

Everywhere I turned I was being constantly reminded of my Twin Flame; every conversation I had, people I overheard talking, the songs I heard; everything served to tell me that I had to find him again. The speed and frequency with which events, signs and synchronicities unfolded left me in no doubt that the Universe was trying to tell me something. This combined with the intense energies I was feeling which seemed to relate to him made it impossible to concentrate on anything.

I had no choice. I had erased his e-mail address but suddenly after 3 years it popped back into my mind. I just wanted to know he was happy. He replied within hours of receiving my email, telling me how much he had missed me all these years. Nothing could have prepared me for the flow of energy I was now experiencing from just thinking about him.

I could feel the slightest variation, the slightest vibration, the slightest shift… I seemed to be able to feel his energies resonate and interact with mine. Soon we were emailing and calling each other daily, discovering how closely our lives had once again reflected one another during the time we were apart. The connection took on a life of its own and we were both swept up in its undeniable magnetic force. Little did I know that in only a few weeks I would be back in his arms on the other side of the Atlantic, discovering just how deep and intense our connection really was, and simply picking up where we had left off last time.

My kundalini awakening hammered into me the fact that my Twin Flame and I were created together, never apart, never separate; always spiritually connected, always one. He is always with me, and he was here all along. My spirit was lifted up into a moment where no time and space existed and where he and I melded as galaxies were born.

We were held in the warm embrace of God, infused in his light and power, yet where I knew that we are nothing but small particles in the vibrating heart of God, merged in All That Is and in each other so deeply that it would be impossible to untangle God from what is between us, or either one of us from our connection with God. We are bound together for eternity by God; our spiritual growth always a reflection of the other. Rather, we are given a glimpse of a higher reality which is now within our view and reach, and we are given the tools to get there, but we still have all our baggage to shed and internal work to do.

Our only hope lies in the promise that the bliss and serenity we feel when we concentrate on the love and on becoming our true self will eventually lead us HOME. Dear Georgio, I feel for you, and I just want to say this: When we love and there is pain… The only thing to do is, love more. Wish more beauty and joy to the One you love. Even if he or she is seemingly far away, twin flames are never far away from us. Sometimes their 3D incarnation cannot be physically near us because of differences of vibrations, being maturity or awareness of actual physical state.

But our higher selves are never apart. In my case, it is a matter of my twin flame being in the other world and myself being in this one. You once advised me to not do anything silly to get close to him faster, and that was a kind thought to have, showing compassion for a part of me that was suffering beyond words.

But I am more patient now, partly because I am learning from this experience and feeling my heart expanding, but also because, simply, his energy is with mine constantly and makes sure I notice! I am having goosebumps and smiling as I write this thinking about the incredibly creative and poetic way this delightful soul finds to make himself heard and seen.

Last time I felt a little down I received this message that I want to share: As we love more, our heart expands and feels more love coming from all around us.



And just love them even more, always. Namaste and may bring more love and joy into your life. Like Liked by 1 person. Thank you Butterfly67… Your love and compassion for your fellow travellers — and to Giorgio — shines so bright. It is not to roll on the floor in agony and die but to open our heart even more; to love until we no longer feel the pain; until loving them beyond our human capacity becomes like breathing to us..

Then all the inner debates, dilemmas and doubts are no more.. It brings us blessings too. May the New Year bring you both Love and abundance from all directions. What I have read now is where I am. As you just have invited, as fellas advised me to do. I have written much and expressed my thoughts my TF because of my past and present pain and what I feel that she also feels. I can allow him this because I know he is not ready to come to me.

You are right as I have already worked it out. She has a very weak Ego path. One that was identical to mine. I can even see very cleary what she will be going through as I have myself. Alas, I can hear you now smiling at me as if to tell me, stop and let her be. She too, as you said already must experience her own faith and that will lead her to her own understanding of what she needs to do to become enlightened as well. She feels me and I her. I love her more and more and more and more every micro second of this life and beyond.

Elysium is where I feel I can touch already. I will be with her here or later on. I know that we have something else to do. How, I do know only that there are a lot of signs coming my way. I am sure that there is other signs going to her as well. It is what it is. I say this every day, as many times as I can, as many times as I can. My TF is the purity God desires. Now I laugh at them as I walk with my creator and look up for his smile that embraces me with acceptance and approval that what I am ding is right for my TF.

I need to learn to forgive and be loving like our creator has taught us all along. I need or want no other. It alienated me more from her, as she is on her journey without me. To my comfort, I get all these messages within not to worry as things are not going to be what they seem. It is a process that we all need to see and recognise as part of our development to grow and love more the more we love. I must and I am exercising the analogy of the pain that I always said to my TF. The Love is always more than the pain. Always I love her and more true to the fact that I could see her do no wrong in my eyes.

My love for her si true and I have let her be more than ever now. After that christmas message, I sent the last response. She knows what it means. That was my message to her and the connection that she sleeps overnight with, every moment that I sleep with as well. Our bond is truly together and certainly as you all tell me, never more than a heart beat away. I am moving to europe to live although I will be working here. She knows where I am if she needs me. She knows who we are. She knows it all, as she always did. Thank you jonna you are always there with open arms and your open heart of divine love for me and my TF.

Dear Doucejonna, That was such a beautiful synchronicity. It warmed my heart when I read your post and brought a beautiful light to the new year. I have not been back on the site since there, but I wanted to say gratitude then and now. How right you are. As we are all at different stages of our journey, we are all experiencing the same. Yes, we are all at different times yet almost identical events. You are a very courageous soul.

Learned and loving, benevolent and preparing to enjoy your eternal seat in the after life, within the Elysian Fields with the Source. I am also going there, as now I have almost surrendered, not just to let her go, but even within my faith that I have let of my TF to be where she wants to be. It is there that she is to be as the carpet unfolds for her as well as I.

I have accepted what my journey is asking me to do. Perhaps I will surprise you, but I mean Not to, as that is what my creator is telling me to do. My spirit is so real, clear and loud with unexplained vision of all that is going on. I feel that I am in Elysium already, as part of me is so calm and contented to be with The Source.

I can assure you Butterfy67, I am not. I am safe and challenged, but I am staying firm with more and more Love for her. She is my TF and it is undisputed. The many signs that come out of the blues must only be to tell me that I must stay put and believe that The Source has more installed for US. You said this and Yes, you are so right. I am at that junction and it has always been there for me. I just feel it more now than ever. My Demons try hard to convince me otherwise. Believe me , I too laugh at them now and ask them not to waste their time. I am within the arms of the blue Angels and Archangel Michael.

I am so happy to be on this path. I am not even scared to die. Just concerned that within this Dimension my TF has a little work to do. But then my creator is beside me and he holds my hand. As we walk together I feel that I am the child that looks up to him and I am welcomed with this beautiful smile of acceptance that I am doing the right thing.

I appreciate your words so much and I feel you and your TF as well. We must become LOVE before we even start to perhaps imagine what is waiting for us next. All I feel and know in my hearts that my creator is the true Life and eternity in motion of this amazing life that is so so beautiful beyond the physical ecstasy. It is beyond words. Beyond All that anyone can ever imagine to be majestic. I am to looking at I am where I am and want more of it.

Time does not exist now anymore. I have connected and I am more in spirit. She is my TF. I need or want No One Else. It is the most satisfying feeling of all contentment. Thank you Butterfly67, may the rest of your journey be as beautiful as your TF and where he is. Elysium is the place. I await the time for me to go there. Like Liked by 2 people. Always enjoy reading you dear Giorgio. I have finally started my blog… From Butterfly I have arrived back home from my short trip. I am very appreciative of both your comments, identical as I noted well and truly as yourselves have as well.

I must share with you both that this really connects US, all on this blog jonna. I am very very spiritual and we all need to learn the path to eternal divine love. I am in it and yes I am loving my Twin as I said more and much more everyday. I see her in bliss now with this white light as I pray for her that she is loved and well.

When I meditate she is there. I can touch her soul and kiss her spirit without any hesitation as my creator does it all for me. I just ask and send my divine love to her through the triangle and I see it going to her. It fills me with joy. Thank you both for your support. Xxxxxxx Love harmony and Believe Xxx Giorgio xxx.

Thank you so much for sharing this publicly. I find myself in nearly the exact same scenario and I have often felt like I have been losing my mind! It is so true. Yet, like you said, my love is within me always and such love is undescribable! Such warmth, compassion, and bliss makes all the yearning worth it. So now I say the inner plane love is such a God-given gift I will accept it and not look forward to a physical meeting until God brings it about. Oh, BTW, I just was reading my dreams yesterday and came across one from December that was about my twin soul!!

I was so amazed! So now I realize we have been together in this lifetime for much longer than I realized. I know we go back almost 1, years in a past life and this will be our last go-around. I welcome the experiences to also come to me further — that will be different to yours I know — but I welcome and look forward to those steps and stages……..! I must share this with you. The time we were born also coincides to be identically matched. I have done my homework and there is no doubt in the world that she might or might not be my TF.

When we look at our photos even the corner of our eyes fit exactly the same, as the left is different to the right. These are a many things that we could never deny. I certainly cannot either. We even like the same decor, fashion trend and happen to even ware the same type of many things. We are a mirror sample not an illusional myth.

I have had to surrender, in All ways to give US both, time to work on ourselves and get our lives in order to be able to create the best of all chances for reunion. We knew 26 years ago who we were for each other and now even more so, yet this operation was necessary. I more so have had to realise and the Source has given me plenty of reasons and signs that I need to believe and have faith. However, she is not ready for reunion. I have had to reassess my position as well, and so neither am I at this point in time ready either. We need to do some more work and with the help of the source we will be ready.

It is not in our power to control this now anymore. My TF is pursuing her own worldly Egoistic comforts and wealth. I on the other hand, must finalise and do the things I need to do to be in a proper frame of mind spiritually and holistically. My TF and I are also so holistically identical. At the moment we are worlds apart in the physical. She is angry and so was I. At the moment we must work on our own explorations of the self. It has also given me the much needed time to realise certain things as well for myself to grow and mature in every way.

My TF, in our 26 years of meeting, has been there through my marriage in the most intimate and personal ways during a few very very significant events. I would not mention any, openly here, because of some obvious reasons. Ever,as I feel her and her thoughts, her actions and her wishes, her anger and her happiness. I did understand her, she just did not realise, what I was trying to tell her. I did not want to be away from her, having to lie to be with her and having to suffer so much, when we leave one another.

She was just NOT ready yet. She saw my cry to be with her as unhappiness. That I was not happy with her or when i was away from her. OUR Separation, I created. I had to, as she needed her free spirit to grow and explore the physical and worldly beauties of life. She needs to understand what true unconditional divine love is. Until she realises and misses it, she cannot understand it let alone want if. I, on the other hand, needed to work on my own other qualities. Like bring home the truth, about how myself must love myself even more, when it is painful and when I feel I am let down.

We both are mirroring each other, so I need to work on myself more than ever to flow what positive energy that I can master, to flow BACK on to her. The pain we feel is not pain. It is a state of mind that I did not accept for our own good and understanding. As well Now I realise that it is for the good of our TF connection more than ever. My TF will not accept that her marriage was over when I told her, just as much as I did within my own marriage.

She does not realise that she is trailing and mirroring me now. She is NOT in her marriage now. Funny how we all need to learn things as we make our own mistakes. Yes, I Left mine to be with her and I brought a lot of pain to myself in doing so. I had to though, and I have no regrets because my TF. My own children and Herself.

She has been in denial and the profession that we are both in provides many opportunities and wealth. It is also a trap in many ways and diversions, that have lessons to learn that all that glitters is not gold. All opportunities carry lessons of life, attached to all that we see and all that we do.

It is a maze of intrigue. I am also amazed at where I am NOW. This blog has give me the space and some appreciated comforts, as well as the understanding that I am not only myself in this same predicament, certainly I am Not alone. My my my, how many others are there out there, who are awakening to the same things that we are experiencing together!!

The similar traits of the TF sequence of events and identical behaviours. Illusional, NO certainly, without a doubt, not. It is bringing out of us, our fears and our Love in so many ways. We can excel to Stay focused and work on ourself, my friend Twin FlameDawning, it is an amazing journey. It is with every moment in the journey. The light at the end of the tunnel is Our creator holding eternity with a smile. The pain is, our mirror realisation of how much our saviour has suffered to try and convince the world of the love our creator has for US all, and what we could have.

I am not comparing the pain that Jesus felt. I cannot even imagine it. I ask why sometimes and I still cannot get an answer yet. The accompanying analogy though is this — No matter how much our TF hurts us, we still love them, even more the more they do because that is what divine love is. Giving more and more love, as Butterfly67 and jonna confirm, the more pain we feel. No now else will be loving them as much as we do. Now, when I look back I laugh and as certain as I said that to her, I am certain that I would do so if need be.

We mirror the love spiritually and physically. It is a divine connection. Contentment is within both of US. There is nothing that can compare and jonna is again right. We are only a breath and a heart beat away from them. I adore My TF no matter what. Our Parents have let us go. We let our children go. We are here to mature and grow, but we must decide who we become and what we do. It will all come back to us. I have given My TF the right to come and go into the garden that always awaits her,. To visit and stay if she chose or wanted to.

Pain is a state of mind once we can understand and manage the situation. It only depends on ourselves no one else. Our Ego trips will come to an end eventually and all we will have left is the truth of who we really are. Our Souls do NOT get old. We just beautify our souls through our own realisations that there is No fear really. There is not materialistic world that is going to last. There is only the truth and our soul at the end. All within eternity and that path is all there is. I adore my TF more and more every day. XXX Thank you jonna and All of you for your support.

You may have a few ticks to place there as you read on, and find yourself saying: I have read quite a bit of the blog that you have given me as the attachment. Lottos tit is what others wish to believe. I understand the doubt, but I also understand myself and the signs I am getting. Believe me, I know who my Twin Flame is. I also know that there is something higher than I and Mightier than I. In reality there is much to consider but when things are holy spiritually one does not need to go into smooch detail.

I look at things from a very simplistic way of reason. I question the reality of the meeting myTF. However, I have seen what the purpose is that I must follow. It is certainly not hazed up. It is very clear what I am doing and I am very contented within.

The Noisy Renaissance

I will wait of my TF and she may or may not come back. Thanks for reading my article. Good luck but life is a very, very kind entity yet, We must all surrender to the higher source. I Believe and love more. I also have this innate calling. It is what it is and the sound is real. I am very in tune with what life represents. Yes there re a lot of questions. For those who do not believe, well there is plenty of tim along the sheet for them to evolve and learn.

I have been too a few things and they are amazingly clear and real. Ian where I should be. Mob faith is real and has brought me to a place of peace. I have alot of family down here so my dad help me move. Since then after i moved my life has changed completely for the better. Ive been to focused on trying to find a job that every time i have down time he pops up randomly lol. Thank you Jonna for your incredible insight. Like some have already stated; you put words to feelings that we cannot. I consider myself to be fairly intelligent and pretty good with words but when it comes to this connection, I am close to speechless.

My connection absolutely refuses to speak because things are so intense and confusing. And this is so unlike me. I would never in a million yrs put myself out there like I have and certainly would never be able to move forward heart wise as I miraculously have been able to do with him. Sonic harmony created a spatial one, motivating bodies, inspiring minds, all of which resonated off the very stones of the city.

Words uttered had both meaning and a spatial echo. Sounds, in the urban environment, did not completely disappear at the moment of their pronouncement. They reflected off walls and left traces in texts, maintaining, imperfectly perhaps, the memory of the dialogue that arranged those stones in the first place and continued to resound within them. In Florence, the dialectic between order and disorder, harmony and dissonance, played out within and around the official soundscape that successive regimes constructed, primarily through the ringing of bells.

This acoustic regime remained relatively stable over throughout the period of the republic, from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, developing only in increasing complexity as time progressed and bells were added, lost, and recast. These were sounds that were intimately connected to the daily lives of Florentines, and they were, by and large, the objects of civic devotion. This particular aspect of the acoustic art of city-building lies between the two opposing but ultimately complementary practices that Pucci expresses: And although this investigation into the urban soundscape primarily concerns Florence, the development of a regular acoustic regime of mass communication, of marking time and prayer in the early modern city, was a near-universal phenomenon in the Christian West.

As a way of introducing the main themes and interpretive methods used in this study, I would like to use the following four narratives—two historical and two literary—to illustrate the tension generated between competing ideas about harmony and discord, order and disorder, in the aural landscape. They are also representative of the ways in which the soundscape can be excavated by attention to both the historical record and narrative invention, how the mechanisms of one can reflect and complement those of the other.

Subjecting both to a representational analysis is not part of a search for historical facts, of piecing together fragments of the soundscape in a process of historical reconstruction. Such an investigation and reconstruction will be dealt with in the next chapter. Instead, the interpretive strategy introduced below reveals attitudes, desires, and assumptions about the meaning, experience, and critical importance of the ability to make noise and the power to interpret sound.

As such, one finds that political conflicts and narrative humor share a great deal of similar attitudes, desires, and assumptions. In the end, Rondinelli failed to appear, and so Savonarola tried to claim victory by forfeit. But in a city intensely divided between his partisans and his enemies, Savonarola was forced to return to his convent of San Marco with an armed government escort, surrounded by his brothers, who had to protect him from many who felt tricked out of a good miracle. The next day, Palm Sunday, an angry mob set siege to San Marco and threatened to kill this false prophet figures 27, Under threat of the wholesale destruction of their convent by an angry and hostile government, they finally surrendered.

Trials ensued, and Savonarola, along with two of his closest aides, was condemned and burned as a heretic in the Piazza della Signoria.

LOVE Music 💫 Twin Flames⎪Twin Souls 🌈 Divine Solfeggio Music

However, what was also at stake was the right to make noise. The government had already decreed that Savonarola had to leave the city, and the streets were increasingly under the control of violent forces. According to Martines, the government decided not to send in its own militias, since they could not be trusted to side against the friars of San Marco. That call for help would also be the last sound it made before it too was condemned by the authorities.

Founded in the tenth century, the Badia, which was originally built at the edge of the Roman city walls, was intimately enmeshed in civic politics. In , levying a new tax on religious institutions to help pay for military operations probably sounded like a good idea to the cash-strapped Florentine government. Politics as usual in late medieval Florence. In the edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , Giorgio Vasari recounts an episode from the life of the fifteenth-century painter Sandro Botticelli.

A cloth weaver moves in next door to the artist and proceeds to assemble no less than eight looms inside his home. He hoists an enormous rock onto the roof of his house and balances it on the wall that separates him from his noisy neighbor figure Dante agrees to put in a good word and sets off to the palace figure But something strange happens along the way: But he mixes up the verses and generally hacks its syntax to pieces, so much so that Dante feels it as a personal injury figure I have no other trade, and you are destroying it for me.

The executor agrees that this is a grave crime indeed, and so, instead of having the fine against Adimari dismissed, Dante succeeds in having it doubled. Therefore, a closer look at what was at stake for Florentines in confronting the noises, and the silences, they encountered can also provide ways of navigating the thorny relationship between historical events and literary narratives. The bell tower of the Badia was an important acoustic transmitter in Florence and was deeply embedded in the daily sonic rhythms of prayer and work.

Each Florentine day began with a complex series of exchanges between the towers of the Badia, the Bargello, and the Palazzo Vecchio—monastery, judicial courts, and legislative councils figure The Badia marked the early morning prayers that led to a dawn mass with a series of rings, which was answered, according to statutes, by six muted rings of the bell of the Leone in the Palazzo Vecchio. This extended series of acoustic exchanges between sacred and secular institutions legally marked the beginning of the day.

Before mechanical clocks, the daily rhythms of monastic life were amplified by bells, so that their salutary sound encompassed the entire city. In exile, Dante placed this sound deep within the Florentine psyche and far back into the distant past. In Paradiso , canto XV, his great-great grandfather, Cacciaguida, laments the moral decline of the future city by remembering the past through the sound of the bell that marked the canonical hours of terce and nones from the campanile of the Badia figure For Dante, the sound of a distant golden age still echoed in the sound of a bell ringing more than two centuries later.

Such a sound excavated the traces of the long-demolished ninth- to eleventh-century walls, which had been built on even remoter Roman foundations. The city at peace—sober and chaste—that lay within those ancient walls of the city was long forgotten as it now spilled out from its original Roman grid into its medieval suburbs figure What is remarkable is the way in which Dante associated ancient Florentine virtue with a particular space and a certain sound. Not only did the bell of the Badia mark time throughout the day; the sonic rhythms that emanated from its campanile also excavated the memory of a privileged urban territory.

Its spatial signification was much more immediate and its temporal and spatial topography more easily apprehended. Bells enacted rituals of inclusion against borders of exclusion. This was so even though Florentines of all classes, rich and poor, lived throughout the areas enclosed by the final circuit of walls. One such unwanted element may have been the concentration of industrial wool production in the very area of the city in which Dante lived.

Around the area of San Martino, which was right next to his beloved Badia, wool workers toiled to the sound of a very different bell figure It would have created an entirely different symbolic territory even within the jurisdiction of the bell of the Badia. These bells were part of an elaborate mechanism that attempted to circumscribe the urban experience of subjected workers.

They represented an acoustic marginalization of one kind of labor located in spaces within the more general rhythm opening and closing workshops that sounded from the Badia. Therefore, the sound of a bell could dissociate a space from its own location and set it adrift in space as part of a network of socio-spatial marginalized zones of segregated labor. The persistence of terce and nones was the power of the bell to evoke the memory of a wished-for past, while at the same time it excluded other spaces created by the sound of other bells or superseded and redefined the spaces created by those very same bells ringing for other reasons.

For Dante, the memory contained within the sound of the bell gave it the power to purge the present of the kind of fractious violence that led to his exile in and was still plaguing a besieged regime in that was struggling to construct a civic acoustic landscape as part of its efforts to maintain political control. Therefore, the city awoke, went to work, ate, prayed, and returned home, all to a familiar sound that bound them together in space, sanctified their labor, and brought the past vividly to life.

Perhaps it was this bond that the government tried to break when it ordered the destruction of the tower. As historian Robert Davidsohn has written, bells functioned as the primary medium of mass communication in an age before printing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the regime had spent enormous sums on the casting of a giant bell that was completed that very year.

Weighing in excess of sixteen thousand pounds, it waited in the piazza while the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was being completed. The new civic soundscape was still under construction, and the Badia may have been a casualty of exuberant mismanagement, because the new bell was destined to bring the entire expanded urban polity together within a single jurisdiction, uniting ancient center with periphery and dismantling the ancient boundaries over which the Badia guarded.

The Council of One Hundred consiglio dei cento set aside funds to help the Badia rebuild its bell tower in completed in , and a new bell was cast in figures 43, This architectural resolution hints at what would become, I believe, an acoustic strategy on the part of the Florentine government. It also speaks to the complicated relationship between successive popular governments and the Benedictines of the Badia. When councilors were being harassed by their political foes, the monks had rented them space to hold their councils in In the same year, the commune required the monks to rebuild their church so that its decrepit state did not embarrass the newly rebuilt city courts across the street.

Conversely, in and again in , the commune threatened to drive a street right through the heart of the Badia to connect the civic grain market which had been appropriated from the monks in to the Bargello, a move that would have required the total demolition of the bell tower figure After the government was forced to pay restitution for initial demolitions in , its conciliatory mood in is understandable.

Instead of silencing them, the government instead amplified their sound. When the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was finally completed in , the daily morning sonic exchange between regime and monastery, which punctuated the entire day, represented a hard-won political lesson. Instead of the usual antagonistic policies of urban planning through architectural demolition, the government used sound not to challenge the Badia but to harmonize itself with an institution to which Florentines felt a strong historical affinity. By the time Dante the author was transformed by Franco Sacchetti into Dante the character, around the s, the civic soundscape had fully integrated itself into the gaps in between the ecclesiastical ringing from both the cathedral and the Badia, carefully orchestrating ancient and new sounds.

What the regime had learned was that bells were better at uniting people than dividing them, and that the future prosperity of the city could be bound to its past glory through the careful orchestration of ancient and new sounds. The implication is that the smith was not reciting from the Commedia precisely, but was singing versions of it that he had heard in the piazza by cantatori who would continually reinterpret stories as they performed them.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, Sacchetti was using Dante and his poetry as a means to explore the complex class relationships in which wealthy, nonelite guildsmen, that fluid class of merchants, bankers, and judges, tried to distinguish themselves from both violent upper-class clans and the less affluent and more numerous lower guildsmen, like blacksmiths, who were legally enfranchised but did not participate directly in the large textile and international financial sectors that drove the Florentine economy.

This context put Dante in a rather awkward position. The text is explicit about how the blacksmith was singing the poem just like a street performer. But those additions and variations were tearing Dante apart. The personal injury he felt was caused by the loss of control over the medium through which he established his identity as a writer and citizen. Sacchetti was posing the question about how much control an author ought to have—even from the grave—over the consumption and distribution of his work and whether the reading and listening public had a right to adapt such texts to its social needs.

It is the means by which he maintains himself, and he had as much right to hold on to it in the way any property holder might, as a particular configuration of words, by virtue of an early idea of what are now known as intellectual property rights. Such restrictions would, theoretically at least, fall within the statutory purview of the regulation of labor and control of who could and could not perform their tasks in public spaces. We are left with the image of the smith, his chest inflated, probably searching for the bellowing force of a true Florentine motto witticism but only able to silently pick up his things and return to work.

He would no longer sing Dante, the narrator tells us, but make do instead with singing the story of Tristan and Lancelot and leave Dante alone. If the poem was his tool, the problem for Dante was that his medium was a more refined version of the very vernacular language his compatriots were using to mangle it. The public realm in which such stories circulated favored the integrity of the community over the integrity of the text or the meaning the author may have intended. Stories told in the public square were tailored to the immediate surroundings and the social situation at hand, both the urbs and the civitas.

So if Dante could not control the content of his narrative, then perhaps he could claim ownership of its style. And the attentive reader would have also enjoyed the multiple layers of irony that resulted from the fact that Sacchetti himself was rewriting in his own idiom a story recounted by the ancient writer Diogenes Laertius in his life of Arcesilaus. He also takes up the ethical question of the proper way to repeat poetic stories.

The young knight, in the fashion of his class, was usurping the space of the commune by the way he rode through it on his horse, wrapping it around himself as if it were his own private mantle. The smith, on the other hand, was participating in the communicative experience of public space. This is the realm that always had the potential, for those who sought to control the message, to corrupt and degrade monologic communication.

Notably, Dante does not denounce the blacksmith to the executor for the crime of singing badly cantare male. Immediately after confronting the singing blacksmith, he begins to think about the nature of the urban spaces he is walking through: It was, after all, the setting and repository of those badly told stories, and therefore needed to be preserved, controlled, and maintained as much by laws as by social rituals and exchanges.

What emerges is a contradiction that illustrates clearly the rhetoric of Florentine republican statutes about public space and the constant desire to co-opt that space for private use by wealthy Florentine citizens. The condemnation of the knight presupposed the uninhibited circulation of bodies in public space, while the condemnation of the blacksmith demonstrated the necessity of obstructing the free flow of information through those very same spaces in order to protect a text that was, in practice, an aural public monument.

In other words, Dante was condemning the privatizing use of space by one class while he sought to privatize the use of the public monument within the proper textual discourses. In both cases, what was at stake was the creation, control, interpretation, and enforcement of public space and the culture of textuality that it supported. Public streets, squares, and palaces represented the universalizing ideology of the merchant republic, while it was the concrete infrastructure that facilitated economic exchange. They were not the private property of violent upper-class elites, because they were part of a long struggle to organize a merchant city.

In fact, arrogant knights such as his widely riding friend disrupted the free movement along public streets that the government was supposed to guarantee figure This was far more annoying than the sad sound of singing blacksmiths. He could hate the blacksmith, but he could not challenge his right to invade public space with the obnoxious sound of his voice. The solution to this problem had to be meted out with cunning and skill, not with legal punishments. He had to educate the smith, however crudely, and convince him, through reason or analogy, to change his misguided ways; which brings me to the rock.

One could assume that the sonic world of Renaissance Florence was radically different from our own, but the issues that surround the global capacities of sound to transgress the physical barriers that we erect around ourselves persist and can be just as bothersome. They reveal to us how our acoustic horizons are still annoyingly but gratifyingly linked to the experience of the early modern city. Since reasoning with the wool weaver failed to resolve the problem, Botticelli resorted to a practical demonstration that taught the weaver a valuable lesson about the relationship between sound, architecture, and urban life.

This story, which appears only in the second edition of the Lives , is likely an invention by Vasari. He also seems to have invented a story describing the kind of jokes the artist liked to play, such as denouncing a friend for heresy, which leads to a stinging rebuke in which his intellectual devotion to Dante is declared to be fraudulent. Both stories help to temper the complete dressing-down he receives for his complete ignorance of Dante. But if this is a fictional tale, what kind of historical knowledge can be drawn from it?

If it sounds like a tall tale, then we may treat it like one. Rather than reading such stories against their grain, why not let them tell us what they want to say? It also demonstrates by example how sound, though invisible and immaterial, had a profound physical effect on the integrity of architecture. It had the power to make walls vibrate, to penetrate boundaries that separated individuals and link them, however discordantly, through their sensual experience of the city.

The expertise of Botticelli, as an artist working in the professional milieu of fifteenth-century Florence, not to mention the artistic ideals of his sixteenth-century biographer, rested in making visible in painting the complex interplay between social relations, literary narratives, biblical truths, and human desires.

In this story he is also depicted as having a very subtle understanding of how those relations may have actually played out in the day-to-day urban context. Walls were never absolute borders, since they always belonged to at least two different spaces at the same time, two different constituencies, or two modes of living that could vibrate in resonance or clash in discord. Botticelli was able to construct ideal spaces and relationships for the figures in the silent world of his paintings, but he was also keenly aware of the more chaotic sensorial dimensions that governed daily life—although, since this story is likely a fabrication, it reflects much more the narrative desire of Vasari to construct a world and a character that creates a dialogue with his artistic output.

This forces us to rethink the way in which we analyze the spatial organization of the historical city. Its design was never fixed in time or space in the experience of its inhabitants. Through the necessity of sensorial perception it emerges as a series of more fluid topographies, brought into being, in this case, by sound. However, by the sixteenth century, within the more erudite world of the emerging discourse of the fine arts, Vasari was also making a distinction between two types of material production that he seems at pains to maintain: Such a distinction would not have been meaningful to the fourteenth-century artistic practices familiar to Pucci.

However, its status as noise is contingent upon the particular place in which it was heard, and what the person who heard it was trying to do. Botticelli may have been a painter, but his work required a mental effort that was shattered by invasive sounds. The only specific law pertaining to noise, however, was concerned with preventing professors and students from distracting each other from their studies. What this story implies about architecture in particular is its role as the pivot around which social relations were played out, where communities were separated and bound together, defined and reimagined, where bodies gave meaning to the buildings—literally making them vibrate—through which they defined themselves.

Architecture was at the heart of the construction of such social relations, so that interpreting its changing meanings is simultaneously an interpretation of the society whose actions were constantly manipulating its surfaces and transgressing its boundaries. In the example in question, it was the incapacity of architecture to parallel an imagined social transformation that called for the discrete division of art from industry, whose excessive industrial noise was now on display.

Which brings us to the silencing of the Piagnona and Savonarola in But Savonarola obviously listened to and learned from the sounds of Florence, given that he was ultimately able to gain the loyalty of large crowds of people. His ever-present voice and the frequent peals of the Piagnona became a regular feature of the Florentine soundscape as he attempted to purge the collective soul of the city.

In contrast, the silenced friars had to endure the noise of obscene and insulting songs that their enemies hurled at them throughout Florence. Unlike the sound that Dante excavated from the past to criticize the factional discord of his present, the sound of the Piagnona failed to unite a city divided between wailers and their enemies, the arrabbiati enraged mad dogs and the compagnacci rude, ugly companions.

However, the exorcising rituals of humiliation brought to bear on the bell only served to augment its aural power. After ringing a single strike of revenge on the death of the executive prior who orchestrated its exile to the observant Franciscan monastery of San Salvatore figure 53 , it was returned to the Dominicans in by Pope Julius II with the permission of a much more sympathetic government. By , the Piagnona transcended its partisan past and redeemed itself when it rang to sound the call to liberty, rallying the whole city during the brutal siege of imperial troops fighting for the return of the exiled Medici family figure When the last Florentine republic fell in and gave way to the establishment of the principate, the sound of bells of the Palazzo Vecchio suddenly became incongruent with the sonic order of the new state.

One of his first official acts was the removal the great bell of the commune, the Leone, from the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, an act that both symbolically and collectively punished the city. On October 1, , the Leone was taken down and ritually broken in the piazza before him. It was also the bell that had called Florentines together, in crisis and celebration, for over two centuries. It was this sound that had called the people to arms—likely on more than one occasion—to chase the Medici from the city as enemies of liberty.

Duke Alessandro most likely knew that as long as the bell was heard, it would remind Florentines of that liberty, and its destruction was an attempt to enforce a collective forgetting. He may have had some success, since the echo of this bell lived on within the vagaries of a silent, unreliable, and depoliticized memory. The sixteenth-century historian Benedetto Varchi wrote that Florentines debated whether the prime motivation to destroy the bell was symbolic or practical, whether Alessandro wanted to silence the memory of republican liberty embedded in its ring, or whether he needed to melt it down to mint coins to pay for the German troops that the emperor had supplied to protect him from that Florentine liberty figure Later, the bell would enter into the official collective memory of the city as a means to smooth over the violent transition from republic to duchy.

He recounts the story of how a Sienese master made it possible, in , for only two men, instead of twelve, to ring the grande campana del popolo , inspiring Cosimo to recall that the bell weighed twenty-seven thousand pounds and could be heard for miles around figure The increasingly complex system of sonic markers that populated Renaissance Florence was part of a continual struggle of contentious communities and institutions to express and link themselves to the jurisdictions over which they laid claim. Florentines had to be adept at hearing the changing socio-political relations that such sounds represented.

All of these stories represent ways in which producing, suppressing, and interpreting the sounds the city made were basic elements of how Florentines carved out spaces within which they imprinted their identities onto the urbs and the civitas. At the micro-level of day-to-day life, Sacchetti could dramatize how Dante learned about the interlaced social and political relations he shared with those above and below him, relations so tangled up with each other that historians have trouble constructing solid boundaries between them.

Florentines knew this much better than we often do, and were constantly listening to the noises their city made, using them as signposts for navigating, willingly or not, through the multiple, fluid, overlapping, and conflicted topographies with which their city confronted them. These stories were also immersed within the sonic landscape of a city that was producing some of the most important cultural, intellectual, and scientific monuments of the early modern world. Read against each other, they reveal important historical knowledge about the way in which the urban environment was a lively field of meaningful signs that provided those who listened carefully with the dense raw material for the aural construction and suppression of the identities and relationships that were such important drivers of its dynamic urban culture.

But the question remains, how was this soundscape constructed? What were its basic parts, and who determined the nature of its rhythms? And finally, what can we learn by reconstructing the sonic armatures through which Florentines communicated to themselves and the world beyond? Answers to these questions will be pursued in the next two chapters. See Brunetto Latini, La rettorica Florence: Galletti e Cocci, ,