The Subjective Perception of Music: Stanislav Vomela and Subjective Research in Psychophysiology in 1930s Czechoslovakia

Abstract

This paper explores the subjective psychophysiological research of the so-called subjective audition conducted by the Czech physician and endocrinologist Stanislav Vomela in the 1930s. It examines Vomela’s attempts to analyze his own peculiar experience of hearing what he called subjective music (music heard only by the subject) and introduces the concept of acousmatics Vomela developed to study this kind of auditory perception. Vomela’s methodology is studied against the background of J. E. Purkyně’s understanding of the subjective empiricist methodology of self-knowing in the physiology of the senses and in the context of research into eidetic imagery by E. R. Jaensch and Victor Urbantschitsch.