The Strange History of Auditory Projective Tests: Disability, Sonic Diagnosis, and the Invention of Psychological Disabilities w/ Mara Mills
Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies.
An ink blot, often used on test subjects in projective tests.
In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while many disabilities were eliminated through medical interventions, a host of new disabilities were invented, especially within the realm of psychology. Mills’s historical work in the audio archives of American Foundation for the Blind reveals how auditory projective testing was used to diagnose blind people with additional psychological disabilities. As we listen to these strange archival sounds, we learn how culture and technology shape the history of human ability and disability.
Read Mara Mill’s article on auditory projective tests, “Evocative Object: Auditory Inkblot” and visit NYU’s Center for Disability Studies, which she co-directs with Faye Ginsburg. Thanks to archivist Helen Selsdon and the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests.
This episode’s theme music is by Mack Hagood with additional music by Graeme Gibson, Blue Dot Sessions, Claude Debussy, and Duke Ellington. The show was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood.
Transcript
[ethereal music plays in the background]
[CRIS CREEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[static and creaking sounds fade in and out]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 8.
[dial tone plays]
[CRIS]
Test Subjects.
[MAN OVER PHONE]
This is the first sound.
[fast ticking of a clock fades in. Water sloshing, then dramatic, ethereal music fades in]
[WOMAN]
They walk together slowly, their feet making a sound together. And the man wonders…wonders why all the noise, all the turmoil, so quiet. When will it stop? So quiet, so peaceful, so serene, so quiet. You can’t forget the quiet. You can’t ever forget.
[sound of a whistle, then a crash. Music and ticking play in background]
[CRIS]
I feel as if I’m being thrown into a space or a place that I am experiencing as anxiety, that sense of the alarms, the hurrying footsteps, the dramatic voice and the time passing. It’s just a kind of a…its a terror of time passing. It’s Jonathan Query’s 24/7 being made manifest in my ears.
[MACK]
Yeah, these are sounds I’ve been playing around with. Our guest for today’s episode just shared this archive of amazing sounds with me, and so I was just playing with them putting them into a collage. A lot of them do seem to induce a bit of a feeling of dread.
[CRIS]
No, I liked it. It was it was full of portent. It was almost as if I was in radio play where most of the dialogue could have been removed and I just had the sound effects left.
[MACK]
Yeah, and as we’ll learn, the sounds are sort of a relative of radio drama and believe it or not, they’re intended to be healing sounds cris.
[CRIS]
No way. I mean, the idea that the clock was kind of coming forwards and going backwards into the distance this stuff is pure terror!
[MACK]
I did mess around with the sounds a little bit, but these are sounds that are supposed to help you become the best person that you can possibly be. Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Haygood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
cris is a poet and performance artist. I’m a scholar of media and communication. Welcome to season two. Today we examine the strange and obscure history of sound being used as a diagnostic tool for the betterment of human beings. Now, how can anyone think that the chilling film noir sounds we just heard could possibly be good for you? Well, maybe I should just let our guest explain it.
[CRIS]
Exactly.
[MACK]
So let’s introduce her.
[MARA MILLS]
My name’s Mara Mills. I’m an associate professor of media culture and communication at New York University, where I also co-direct the Center for Disability Studies.
[MACK]
Mara is a scholar of both media studies and a scholar of disability studies.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
But the reason she’s on our show is that she combines these two seemingly different fields by working in sound. The mysterious recordings that we were just listening to have to do with research that Mara was doing on books for the blind.
[MARA]
Well in 2015, I was collaborating with Helen Selsdon, who’s the archivist At the American Foundation for the Blind to digitize their Talking Book collections.
[jazzy music plays in the background]
So we took the entire collection because they were fairly fragile to a high end digitization company in New York. I had a grant from the National Science Foundation to pay for the digitization, so we towed them in the trunk of my car, tons and tons of these records to this company and had them digitize them for us. They gave us back an external hard drive with completely unlabeled WAV files, which meant that I had to go through and listen to each one of the files to figure out what it was and to correlate it to whatever the title was on the finding aid, if there even was one, it was extremely time consuming.
[MACK]
So Mara has all of these digitized, unlabeled files. Meanwhile, she gets this really great invitation to be a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. So by day, she’s doing all of this stuff there at the institute, and then by night, she sitting in her Berlin apartment just listening to these strange files.
[MARA]
Many of which, in fact, are pretty remote from what one would think of as a book.
[music continues to play]
So listening to these files, many of them were in fact talking books, which were novels narrated by famous Broadway stars in New York in the 1930s and 1940s for blind readers made in the AFB studios. I expected that.
[a sample of an audio book is played. Has underlying static throughout.]
[AUDIO BOOK WOMAN]
“The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde. Recorded solely for the use of the blind in the Talking Books Studios of American Foundation for the Blind Incorporated. Read by Eva Le Gallienne. High above the city on a tall column stood the statue of the Happy Prince. he was gilded all over with…
[MARA]
Some of them were very unusual. It would be sort of 60 minutes of electronic beeping, which turned out to be the output of reading machine,s scanner based electronic reading machines that were text to tone, things like the visi-toner or the stereo-toner.
[several beeps are heard]
[CRIS]
What’s A visi-toner?
[MACK]
Well, the visi-toner is like a brand of something called an optophone. The visi-toner was actually made really nearby to us in Dayton, Ohio under a contract from the United States Veterans Administration. Basically, it’s this little machine that you would pass over a line of printed text. It would turn the letters into these sort of musical tones that blind people were able to interpret as letters.
[CRIS]
That is super interesting, so they have to learn the alphabetic-turnel correlation.
[MACK]
Yeah, and they can listen to their utility bills. It was used for these sort of perfunctory things just like the mail came in, I got to see what my bills are and they could listen to it like that.
[CRIS]
I love that.
[MAN ON OLD TAPE]
You’re hearing capital B now.
[beeping that is the equivalent of a capital B]
Here’s capital C.
[Mara]
Then, I came across this album. It seemed to me to be a series of nonsense words and completely ambiguous, nonsensical, disconnected sentences. So, a narrator with a ambiguously gendered voice sounding like a speaker from mid century radio, reading out sentences like you touch and a little comes off on your fingers.
[NARRATOR]
You touch, and a little comes off on your fingers, and you have to dust off your fingers.
[MARA]
Then moving on to another sentence totally disconnected from that one.
[NARRATOR]
A long shiver, it passes. Steps coming slowly.
[MARA]
My mind was racing to understand what those sentences could mean. Was this about a sugar donut? Was it about bicycle grease? What could this possibly be about?
[a ticking clock is heard in the background]
[NARRATOR]
Afraid. Afraid.
[ominous music plays with the ticking clock]
The chair was hard, but you knew she didn’t care, and she sat very straight, and around her there was silence. He picked up the little thing and turned it in his fingers, and it seemed he might never stop turning it and feeling of it. They walk together slowly, their feet. making a sound together.
[MARA]
I decided I had to know more about what this was. Who made this? What was it meant to do?
[NARRATOR]
All the noise, All the turmoil. When will it stop? So quiet, so peaceful, so serene.
[music and clock ticking fade out]
[MARA]
It turned out that the American Foundation for the Blind, the AFB had actually commissioned this record in 1952, and they commissioned it to be an auditory version of the thematic apperception tests, or TAT, which by then was a fairly well known means of psychological testing for sighted people. It was a series of still images, black and white sketches designed in the 1930s by a psychologist Henry Murray, who worked at Harvard and artist Cristiana Morgan.
[old timey music plays in the background, light static is in the recording]
The images that Morgan drew were meant to be extremely ambiguous. They were meant to be generalized. They were meant to be interpretable in many different ways by a wide range, almost a universal range, of people. The viewer, in this case of the visual TATs, was usually asked in a psychological office to look at one of the particular images and then to write a story about it.
[music continues, mainly piano music]
After that story was written about the image, the difficulties arose. The psychologist then had to figure out themselves how to interpret that story, what it meant, what it meant about that person, what it meant about their latent personality traits or about their feelings.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
The thematic apperception test, just the story of it is really fascinating. Morgan and Murray were really interesting people. Morgan was this artist and writer and she was an amateur psychoanalyst who collaborated with the famed psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. Murray was this Harvard psychologist, and the two of them became lovers, which was actually something that Jung had recommended so that they could release their creative energies.
[CRIS]
I say nothing.
[MACK]
In the 1930s!
[Mack and cris laugh]
It was all going off.
[MACK]
Yeah, it really was.
[CRIS]
That’s what happens with prohibition.
[MACK]
I mean, I guess it worked because they created the thematic apperception test after that, and the TAT became one of the most widely used projective tests in the world.
[old timey piano music fades back in]
[MARA]
The auditory version of the projective test, the one commissioned by the AFB, was produced by a psychologist in Hartford named Seidel Braverman and also a fairly well known blind memoirist and radio script writer who lived in New York named Hector Chevigny. Chevigny had written a memoir called “My Eyes have a Cold Nose” that was a reference to his service dog, his eyes. Chevigny, having experience in radio as a script writer, but also as a producer had lots of contacts in New York from whom he could acquire sound effects, voice actors, and he helped Seidel produce this oral analog to the visual TAT. So, the auditory protective test had several sections, and I had to listen to the whole thing to figure out what those sections were. So I’ve now administered about 40 protective test to myself.
[dramatic music plays]
[NARRATOR]
It was there, strong and straight, and seemed destined never to come down. Moving and then stopping, and then moving again, but always forward. Forward, soft, very soft, and warm.
[MARA]
The opening section contained these ambiguous descriptions of objects or scenes, and at the beginning of this section, listeners are instructed to tell what happened, what led up to it and what the outcome will be. That’s followed by these very ambiguous descriptions of scenes or objects.
[NARRATOR]
It was harsh, high and loud, and it kept on and on and you couldn’t stop it. You couldn’t stop it at all.
[ticking clocks are heard, then fade out]
[MARA]
So the second section of the auditory projective test is a series of dialogues and an invented language, a completely nonsense language, but spoken in very highly charged or effective intonation. To my mind and to my interpretation, these dialogues sounded either extremely angry and heated or extremely sad. Of course the whole point of it is is to figure out what the listeners interpretation of the dialogues are, but there was no way to know what the language was because they were completely invented words.
[a man and woman speak back and forth in a made up language. Their tone appears to be angry]
The listener was asked to tell a story about what the dialogue was about, to put words in the actors mouths. It turns out that these voice actors were from New York. They knew Hector Chevigny. They were trained in double talk, a strategy used by people on stage or on radio to use invented words, usually just one at a time, sprinkled into speech for humorous effect.
[the made up conversation continues]
[MACK]
That’s why I said earlier that this recording or these recordings were a relative of radio drama, because this blind script writer Chevigny had access to all of these great voice actors to create these tests.
[CRIS]
I’m thinking about traditions of nonsense poetry. I’m thinking about Russian futurist trans rational sound, the idea of an invented language that would cross national boundaries. I’m thinking about Esperanto. I’m thinking about other traditions of nonsense poetry like Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky.” I’m thinking about Hugo Ball with his sound poems. I’m thinking about Kirch Fitters, Ursa Naughta. There’s a whole world here of composing and invented languages.
[MACK]
I’m thinking about the peas and carrots, peas and carrots that they used to teach us as actors if you were supposed to be whispering in the background.
[CRIS]
And kind of Pig Latin. We’re into a territory of opacity and transparency in relation to what words signify, what they bring. Not just a sort of literal, literal translations and literal interpretations, but the analogues, the metaphors, the dirty stuff.
[MACK]
The ways that sounds and words conjure things within us.
[the made up conversation continues, then the ticking clock fades in]
[MARA]
Then there’s a final section of the record with several tests which just have nonverbal sounds, and the sounds were from the ABC sound effects department. Each test would have 10 or so sounds played in a row, a gunshot, a dog barking…
[several sound effects are played in a random order]
The listener was instructed to aggregate these sounds into, if not a story into some sort of cohesive anecdote, to explain what these sounds are doing assemble together. The listener would either verbally, in each of these cases, say out their explanation to a psychologist or write down a story or a paragraph about them and then submit it to that psychologist.
[sound effects continue, then fade out.]
[CRIS]
So, how widespread was this kind of work with auditory perception on the tests?
[MACK]
I think that this test itself wasn’t like really used that much with blind people. it was a little bit, but as Mara did more research, she came to realize that the use of sound for this kind of projective testing was pretty widespread. In fact, the history of psychological projective testing is at least as much sonic as it is visual.
[calm music plays in the background]
[MARA]
Well, after listening to the auditory protective test, I wanted to know if this was one of a kind or if it was part of a bigger genre. I immediately discovered that of course, the entire field of projective testing probably starts with auditory protective testing, even if it wasn’t called that immediately, and dates to word association tests produced at the beginning of the 20th century by people like Carl Jung, and most famously by Carl Jung, but there were precursors to him. In Jung’s word association testing he published I think his first article on it in 1910. He wrote a list of test words,green water, ink, which he would then read in the clinical setting to a patient and ask the patient to respond to him with the very first word that came to their mind, creating a sort of couplet of terms between the tester and testee, the therapist in the patient. He then would try to interpret what that meant either with the patient or on his own.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
Alright cris, let’s do this. Green.
[CRIS]
Grass.
[MACK]
Water.
[CRIS]
I can’t say bong on the radio.
[MACK]
Bong, is that what you said?
[Mack and cris laugh]
[CRIS]
Well, Bong Water. It was that famous band.
[MACK]
A great band. Ink.
[CRIS]
Um, pollution.
[MACK]
Window.
[CRIS]
Vibrancy.
[MACK]
Friendly.
[CRIS]
Tea.
[MACK]
Cold.
[CRIS]
Map.
[MACK]
Village.
[CRIS]
Idiot.
[MACK]
I really liked that you call that you came up with poison after ink. Never give a poet a word association test, I guess.
[CRIS]
Well, I think of writing as pollution.
[slow music fades in]
[MARA]
After looking into Jung, I decided I wanted to follow up more specifically on other recorded auditory projective tests. In fact, there were a ton of protective tests recorded on phonograph records starting in the 1930s with the advent of electrical recording. One of the earliest that I came across shockingly was made by BF Skinner.
[MACK]
Yeah, and he was a guy who really didn’t care about interiority very much. He liked to call the brain a black box that just had inputs and outputs.
[MARA]
He was a postdoc at the time at Harvard, and he created something that he called the verbal submator.
[the sounds of the submator. A male voice speaking through static.]
Basically, he had been working late nights in the lab as a postdoc and hearing all sorts of weird machine sounds. Those machines sounds he was fantasizing, hallucinating, were speech. The machines were telling him go outside, go outside, because he was exhausted and didn’t want to work in the lab anymore. He thought to himself, oh, what would it be like to make a record with speech as if it was heard behind a wall or heard in another room? Muffled speech. I could play this record then for people, and it would advance what he called Verbal Behavior from them, because he was already getting interested in behaviorism. This, for Skinner, was still quite close to something Freudian. In fact, he even says in his report about it, that it might be useful for some sort of radiant analysis that you would get to know something about someone’s personality. He quickly moved way farther into his behaviorist studies which were all about the seemingly endless potential to train animals and humans to do totally new things. The human is a blank slate.
[submator sounds fade out and horn music fades in]
After encountering the Skinner Test, I learned that there was another entire sub field of auditory protective test based on music. A number of psychologists some at Harvard, some colleagues of Skinner’s like Carl Coonsa, either created new recordings, or used existing recordings of music. So Carl Coonsa’s musical reverie test as he called it, used pieces by, for instance, Debu and would ask a listener to sit in a very comfortable armchair, listen to this piece of music and then tell a story about it, which they then would use to diagnose them with personality propensities or disorders.
[background music gets louder, sounds like concert music.
[MACK]
So cris, so far we’ve heard how NYU Professor Mara Mills has assembled this curious history of auditory predictive tests. All of which propose to mind some kind of essence from the individual by having them listen to sound and then respond to what they’d heard, which is cool. What I love about Mara’s work and what really inspires me about it is that she uses history such as these to ask really big questions. Questions like, when we test someone what are we really testing, where derived notions of normalcy come from, and who or what do these ideas of normal really support?
[MARA]
Morgan and Murray described their own process as analysts of these tests as a process of double hearing. It’s interesting that they use the word hearing, because they were, again, working with visual projective tests, not the auditory ones. If the testee is supposed to look at a test and give an interpretation of it, the analyst is giving an interpretation of an interpretation, they’re supposed to have double hearing. They’re supposed to themselves think about what their interpretation of the test would be, what the average normal interpretation of the test would be, and then think about how the interpretation of the testee works. Another problem that arose for me is that as a historian, I’m supposed to have triple hearing or actually, I wanted myself to have triple hearing. I wanted to will myself into trouble hearing. I wanted to let myself take the TAT naively experience it. What did I think of this? I also had to hear like the psychologist, I had to understand what the psychologists are doing. Then I also have to hear in this very broad socio historical contextual frame like a historian.
[ticking clock fades in with dramatic music]
I come to this project as a disability historian and I came to this project as someone interested in access technologies for blind people. The idea that blind people we’re also going to be subjected to the medica perception tests just made me question access to what. Of course, there’s not just access to nice novels and other sort of things that blind people choose, but there’s, access to disciplining and diagnosing technologies that were happening at the same moment.
[MACK]
You know, the French historian of ideas and philosopher Michel Foucault was asking some similar questions as he looked at historical practices such as diary keeping and letter writing and confession in the Catholic Church. These are all activities where we think we’re burying our soul. We’re revealing our innermost depths. Foucault said, no, no, no, no, these are the activities, the techniques, these are the technologies by which we really invent the soul. In those moments, that’s where we construct the self. The self isn’t already there inside of us as this kind of unchanging essence. We invent it through these cultural activities. The ancient stoics and their journaling were trying to achieve self mastery. The Catholic’s confession was used to craft a soul that was purged of sin, and in the modern era psychology and it’s tests and therapies are designed to make us well and whole.
[CRIS]
Right, and in fact, I mean, I suppose we are increasingly being conditioned by these technologies.
[MACK]
Yeah. One last thing, there’s this historian of science at Harvard, Peter Galison, and he wrote this great piece about the Rorschach inkblot test where he says, first, in order to even create a test like that, you have to have some sort of idea of what the self is that you’re testing for. There was this idea that there’s a deep unconscious,Freudian self that could be evoked or brought out by the ink blot. Back when the first project of tests were invented, only a few bearded psychoanalysts shared this new kind of modern notion of the self. What happens? They begin administering the test and then by the very act of testing, this new notion of the self begins to spread throughout the culture.
[CRIS]
Oh, yeah. We see it all. We hear it, and we see it all around us right now in terms of arguments about identity, arguments about behavior.
[MACK]
This is the kind of cultural history that Mara Mills is exploring through these auditory projective tests.
[music and sounds fade out]
[MARA]
The thematic apperception test, the visual ones, were not meant to ever circulate widely, because it would buy us the test results if someone had seen the image before. Of course, today in the digital moment, all of the cards, all of the images can be seen easily online. If you want to look at them, the first problem that immediately one can see is that they are not as generalized nor as ambiguous nor as neutral as they were supposed to be.
[old timey music plays with static]
They’re supposed to be like inkblots. Extremely ambiguous scenes that anyone can relate to and that will plum something about that person. Of course, they’re all scenes of white people from the early to mid 20th century. Many of them are middle class scenes. If they’re not middle class scenes than they are scenes, which to the present day eye, represent middle class fears about urban degeneracy.
[music continues]
So these are clearly not neutral test taking instruments in the first place. For Morgan and Murray, who did not create a coding scheme, they eventually settled on this idea that the correct answer was the average answer. Reality is what most people perceive. If most people believe that an image of two people embracing is an image of a heterosexual married couple, then that’s the correct response, and anyone who interprets that image as a homosexual image, as an image of an affair, as a pedophile like image, whatever, that then is revealing something pathological about themselves. I mean, it’s terrifying to think that truth is the statistically typical. There were more complex coding schemes than that. That is, to me a quite terrifying way to interpret those images. Many of the disorders they were supposed to diagnose, it was often things like sexual disorders, it was often things like homosexuality, which after 1973 is no longer considered to be a disability. The suite of things called disabilities at that time, which psychologists were looking for, many of them aren’t even considered to be disabilities today. If you’re looking for homosexuality, yeah, you can find it. If they’re looking for other affective disorders, they might be able to find it, but these are things that we wouldn’t consider to be fixed traits today and aren’t considered to be disabilities today. Certainly, the way people use TATs has shifted. As people, the way we think about sexuality has shifted from something that’s fixed, from something that’s anate, to something that’s much more fluid or the way we think about gender has shifted or what counts as a disability has shifted.
[music plays, then fades out]
[MACK]
I think what all of this shows us is that normal has a history. Disability has a history.
[slow music fades in]
[MARA]
I think what was also interesting about the auditory projective test for blind people, it could be used to help blind people understand their interests, and then think about what kind of education they wanted to get, what kind of jobs they would want to go into, but it could also be used to diagnose additional disabilities in a universe of proliferating disability, which is what the 20th century was. As many infectious diseases and disabilities from prior times began to vanish, because of new healthcare interventions, pharmaceutical interventions, a whole host of other disabilities began to be invented, especially in the case of like the DSM, psychological disabilities, the proliferation in that realm of disability. It’s interesting to think of blind people then being diagnosed with this whole range of other disabilities, perhaps through the auditory protective test. All of the impairments that all of us can be tested for in this particular moment where disability and impairment are presumed to be lurking everywhere and presumed to be a sort of baseline.
[MACK]
Back when we were an agrarian nation, there was no such thing is ADHD.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
It didn’t exist as a disability because it didn’t have a reason to. When you were using the plow or
what have you, it didn’t require that much trained attention. Also, there weren’t that many things around to distract you either.
[CRIS]
That’s right. Well..
[MACK]
Some birds or, I don’t know.
[CRIS]
Yeah, flies. Dust on your shoes.
[Female laughing is heard, with the sound of people booing. A siren starts to blare, then the sound of the clock ticking takes over. Mysterious music plays with the ticking]
That’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Mara Mills for coming on the show and to Helen Selsdon on the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests. You can learn more about Phantom Power, find transcripts and links to the things we talked about and find previous episodes of the show at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple podcast. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter and music was by Mack Haygood, Graham Gibson and Blue Dot Sessions, as well as Duke Ellington and Claude Debussy. The show was edited by Craig Alien and Mack Haygood. We’d like to bid a fond farewell and happy graduation to our intern Adam Whitmer and we welcome our new intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from rheRobert H and Nancy J. Blaney Endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[sounds and music fade out]
