Voices//\\Ghosts

"As John Cage has insisted "there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound....Similarly, there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something else to see. To look at something that's "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something -- if only the ghosts of one's own expectations." 

-- Susan Sontag, 'The Aesthetics of Silence'

‘Realised Mysticism’: The Use of Voice in Two Films by Carl Th. Dreyer

by Dalia Neis (taken from www.closeupfilmcentre.com):

"The American composer John Cage defined a new level of listening to sounds through the simple observation of the sound process: “New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sound would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds” [10]. The Passion of Joan of Arc operates through a similar process; through the inconsistency of the intertitles, the spectator is forced to readjust to a new kind of aural experience. We watch out for the intentions and particular tones of the voice, rather than the literal meaning of the spoken and written words. [11]   The contrast of the interrogators’ physical gestures to those of Joan of Arc are extreme: Her mouth does not move, it remains fixed, what moves is her hands. Her reaction to the horror that her interrogators impose on her is to clasp her mouth, grab her neck and cover her ears. It is these gestures that on one level can be read to express her muteness, her lack of voice in contrast to her interrogators. (In fact, it is this reading which governsMark Nash’s and David Bordwell’s understanding of the voice.) Yet on another level, it could be read as her last desperate plea for the internal, visionary voice to transcend and prevail over the authoritative voices of her interrogators. Through pointing to her throat, her mouth and ears, she touches and alludes to the mechanism of voice, the limits of these external organs to articulate a voice, and to the limits of her interrogators’ voice. She points to the inner voice which will never surrender to the voice of authority and law. Dreyer writes about ‘realized mysticism’, referring to the gestures behind the look, the soul that is turned inside out. Through holding her mouth and holding her ears she becomes deaf and dumb to the outside external world and reaches within, concentrating on evoking the internal voice. Her gestures also seem to take on the archetypal and familiar image of the scream, associatively referring us to the infamous Munch painting of same name."

from ‘Realised Mysticism’: The Use of Voice in Two Films by Carl Th. Dreyer

by Dalia Neis (taken from www.closeupfilmcentre.com)

'I'm too sad to tell you' by Bas Jan Ader (1971)

"Although the work is silent, there are moments when we might hear his crying -- it is there, like a lost soundtrack that comes to ghost the image......The shouts traced above- and all shouts, songs, and cries in general -no doubt have as their ultimate horizon that of the scream. To return to Edvard Munch's The Scream, the mouth in the midst of such gaping emptiness opens the way toward hearing what is so often unable to be spoken of" 
 -- Brandon La Belle,  Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary

Laocoön and His Sons [detail]

"The hyper-violent ending of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo (1976) is most savage due to its removal of screams from the soundtrack. As young men and women lie stomach down in a sandy courtyard and have their tongues cut out and scalps pried back, the soundtrack indifferently hisses with recorded silence and optically encoded crackles. We see their mouths open wide in screams we do not hear. The voyeuristic distance we enjoy from the spectacle is contracted and thrust inward to us as we are refused the pleasure of the scream as both aural cum shot and iconic softener for the extreme actions visually depicted. Due to the cinema's incessant employment of the scream as a sonic simulacrum for that which cannot be shown, the atypical apparition of a silenced scream on the soundtrack presents the cinematic apparatus as an inverted audiovisual machine, here psychologically amplifying the scream by muting it in the mix. The machinic effects of the cinematic apparatus are painfully apparent in Salo's finale: it is like the cinema itself has been technologically short-circuited, blowing out the speakers and upsetting any intended audiovisual normality. Silent footage and extreme violence tend to go hand in hand 2, and have established a semiotic effect of morbidity which cinema usually avoids. Stan Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1972) unsettles the stomach as a coroner operates on a range of bodies in total cinematic silence. The withholding of the expected squelching creates a vacuum of clinical silence in the morgue. As hushed witnesses we are refused all form of bodily and psychological catharsis through psychoacoustic triggers: breath, voice, scream, music, etc. Instead we must stare blankly as the scalp of a patient is rolled down the front of his face and clamped in his mouth while the skull is sawn open to remove his brain. The image is most disorienting; its silence most disquieting"

-- 'I Scream in Silence' by Philip Brophy

"What he shares with Mahler is the tone of remoteness from the world, the gesture of fighting a losing battle, despite the contrast between Mahler's vast canvases and his own minimal ones, between the threefold fortissimo and the threefold pianissimo. This pianissimo should not be taken as it sounds, in other words as the reflex of the most delicate stirrings of the soul, even though it is that as well.  Frequently, and especially in the Orchestral Pieces but also in some passages of the succeeding Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op.7, and the Pieces for Cello and Piano Op. 11, this threefold pianissimo, this almost inaudible sound, is nothing but the threatening shadow of an infinitely remote and infinitely more powerful din. This was the sound of the rumble of artillery from Verdun in 1916 that carried as far as a forest avenue near Frankfurt. Here Webern comes close to Georg Haym and Georg Trakl, the prophets of the war of 1914; the falling leaf becomes the harbinger of catastrophes to come. " - Theodor Adorno 'Anton Webern' in Sound Figures

Anton Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6

" A last iteration of the ten note-collection occurs in measure 30, and percussion crescendo through measure 41 - torn of in silence after the triple forte is reached. This is the stifled, musical scream to which the entire work builds....

...

I would like to suggest that the piece of music under discussion embodies a traumatic dimension. .... The pervasiveness of mutes is crucial in the work at hand; it is as if the entire content of the piece were heard in an interior space blocked from open expression. And although fortissimo, not all instruments of the penultimate cluster are playing; it is an interior scream" - David Schwarz on Webern, Opus 6, No. 4 "Marcia funebre"

 The Death of Anton Webern

 I

b. December 3 1883
Brown dominant, cigars, mahogany,
sepia afternoons with umber shades.
Contralto darkness of sentiment, Love
leads to marriage, and mahogany, cigars.

The evening shadows in the forest spread
as the fated couples move side by side
to the cadence of appropriate resolution

In the half light of the middle distance
someone is preparing to scream

II

yaaaaaaaaaereeooobhbhbh
uuuuuuuuuh
unh unh aauaugh
ohhoooooooooheeee
ggggggggghaaaeee
aaaahuaaaahuaaaahuaaaa

III

The men and women enter the streetcar
multiple as statistics, paticular as portraiture. Factories
turn them out at the end of the day,
and in the morning they rise from bed
to take their places at the machines.

The wheels follow the inevitable tracks
as evening performs its metamorphosis.
A boy enters the car, an old man leaves
The crowd inside the glass observes the faces
that move along the darkening street outside.
A hundred strangers going home together

-- David Helwig

"And I saw that my face had abandoned me"

" I want to walk by the forest hem, a thing of silence from whose speechless hands the sun has slipped with his bright hair, a stranger on the hillside of evening who weeps and opens his eyelids above the stony city, a deer that stands still in the peace of the ancient elder. O the darkening head lies listening without repose, or the hesitant footsteps follow the blue cloud on the hillside, follow also its solemn stars. At my side the green seed escorts me in silence, the deer is my companion on mossy forest paths. The huts of the villagers are dumbly shut and the wail of the brook brings fear in the windless blackness. But when I went down the rocky path, madness took me and I screamed aloud in the night. And when I bent down with silver fingers over the silent waters, I saw that my face had abandoned me. And the white voice said to me: “Go kill yourself.” With a groan the shadow of a boy rose up within me and looked at me with radiant eyes so that I fell down weeping under the trees, under the mighty vault of the stars." 

-- from Offenbarung und Untergang [Revelation and Apocalypse] by Georg Trakl, 1914/1915  (trans. Max Wickert)

'Untitled 3' from Offenbarung und Untergang by Georg Trakl, by Etant Donnés and Michael Gira

 

Coil - 'It's In My Blood' from The Ape of Naples (2005) - published posthumously after the death of John Balance in November 2004; the album was originally to be named 'Fire of the Mind'. Artwork by Ian Johnstone.

 "Now we say 'plants' and sound fills the air. But in the future epoch man will say 'plants' and this will cause their growth." - Rudolph Steiner



"When it was becoming unbearable - once toward evening in November and the sight of the lit-up street, then turning to the interior of the room found a new goal in the depths of the looking glass and screamed aloud, to hear only my own scream which met no answer nor anything that could draw it, force away, so that it rose up without check and could not stop even when it ceased being audible, the door in the wall opened toward me, how swiftly, because swiftness was needed and even the cart horses down below on the paving stones were rising in the air like horses driven wild in a battle, their throats bare to the enemy" - Franz Kafka, Unhappiness. 

Tortoise Shout - D.H. Lawrence

Tortoise Shout

BY D. H. LAWRENCE

I thought he was dumb,

I said he was dumb,

Yet I've heard him cry.

First faint scream,

Out of life's unfathomable dawn,

Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim,

Far, far off, far scream.

Tortoise in extremis.

Why were we crucified into sex?

Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,

As we began,

As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

A far, was-it-audible scream,

Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

Worse than the cry of the new-born,

A scream,

A yell,

A shout,

A pæan,

A death-agony,

A birth-cry,

A submission,

All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.

War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,

Why was the veil torn?

The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?

The male soul's membrane

Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.

Crucifixion.

Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,

Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell

In tortoise-nakedness,

Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof,

And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,

Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension

Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!

Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck

And giving that fragile yell, that scream,

Super-audible,

From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,

Giving up the ghost,

Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.

His scream, and his moment's subsidence,

The moment of eternal silence,

Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once

The inexpressible faint yell —

And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back

To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.

So he tups, and screams

Time after time that frail, torn scream

After each jerk, the longish interval,

The tortoise eternity,

Agelong, reptilian persistence,

Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.

I remember, when I was a boy,

I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;

I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;

I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night

Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;

I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;

I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;

I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;

I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;

I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning

And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing,

And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,

The first wail of an infant,

And my mother singing to herself,

And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,

The first elements of foreign speech

On wild dark lips.

And more than all these,

And less than all these,

This last,

Strange, faint coition yell

Of the male tortoise at extremity,

Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.

The cross,

The wheel on which our silence first is broken,

Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence

Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,

Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,

The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,

That which is whole, torn asunder,

That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

Blood Curdling, Blood Curdling, Blood Curdling, Anti-Sexual, Violent, Animalistic.....My Goodness She Really Scared The S@#* Out Of Me.

Listen here (from around 5:30 if you don't have 8mins of life to spare)
 

but the cry makes me blind

"For when we shout, we tear. We tear apart distance; we disallow distance to the object of our anger, or of our ecstasy. When I shout, I am all voice, you are all voice, the space between us is nothing but a delirium tremens of voice"

(Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism)

"You will grant me that the one that is introduced by the experience of the unconscious is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture"
(Jaques Lacan)


"With the 'scream', at whatever level of intensity, no illusion is possible....Wagner argues...it is possible to pierce these beautiful musical forms through moments of rupture"
(Stephen Downes)

but

"The cry makes me blind, swallowing up the world of visible distances and distinctions." 
(Steven Connor)

(https://meicaa.wordpress.com/tag/mom/)

Max Beckmann, Blind Man's Buff, 1945.

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait, 1901.

The Surface of Last Screaming // Dying Star Screams As It Falls Into Black Hole

The Surface of Last Screaming

"Consider an infinite field full of people screaming. The circles are their heads. You are screaming too. (Your head is the black dot.) Now suppose everyone stops screaming at the same time. What will you hear? Sound travels at 330 m/s. One second after everyone stops screaming you will be able to hear the screams from a `surface of last screaming' 330 meters away from you in all directions. After 3 seconds the faint screaming will be coming from 1 km away...etc. No matter how long you wait, faint screaming will always be coming from the surface of last screaming - a surface that is receding from you at the speed of sound (`vsound'). The same can be said of any observer - each is the center of a surface of last screaming. In particular, observers on your surface of last screaming are currently hearing you scream since you are on their surface of last screaming. The screams from the people closer to you than the surface of last screaming have passed you by - you hear nothing from them (gray heads). When we observe the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background] in every direction we are seeing photons from the surface of last scattering. We are seeing back to a time soon after the big bang when the entire universe was opaque (screaming)."

Taken from: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March03/Lineweaver/Lineweaver7_2.html

Dying Star Screams As It Falls Into Black Hole

"As a doomed star spirals closer and closer to a black hole that's about to gobble it up, it lets out periodic bursts of light that scientists liken to dying screams, scientists say.

The star is falling into a gigantic black hole in the center of a distant galaxy that lies 3.9 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellation Draco. As the remains of the star get pulled in, it releases blips of light about every 200 seconds, with occasional lags.

"You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," Jon Miller, a University of Michigan astronomer, said in a statement. Miller was part of a team that detected the light blips using two orbiting X-ray telescopes: NASA and Japan's Suzaku, and Europe's XMM-Newton..... "In order for the black hole to feed from a star that its gravity has broken apart, the remains of the star must form an accretion disk surrounding the black hole," said the study's leader, University of Michigan astronomer Rubens Reis. "The disk gets heated up and we can see emissions from the disk very close to the black hole in X-rays. As this matter is falling in, it gives a quasiperiodic wobble and that's the signal we detected.

Though the dying star's signal comes to us in the form of light, the researchers liken it to sound because it comes at a characteristic frequency that, if converted to sound, would make an ultra-low D-sharp.

Never before have such screams been heard from a star falling prey to a black hole so distant, or one that had been thought to be dormant, like this one."

Taken from: http://www.space.com/16910-dying-star-screams-black-hole.html

I shall sit on the ground and scream

"Lucile: Everything's astir: clocks tick, bells ring, folk pass, water flows, everything continues just as before, for ever and for ever.
--But no! It mustn't happen, no! I shall sit on the ground and scream, so everything stops, shocked into stillness, not a flicker of movement. [She sits down, covers her eyes, and screams. After a pause, she stands up] It makes no difference. Things are just as they were. The houses, the street. The wind blows, the clouds drift. -- Perhaps we just have to bear it" 

- Georg Büchner, Danton's Death [Dantons Tod]


“Sounds rush forward.../ Cold light reigns everywhere/Everything Stops”

- Antonin Artaud, There Is No More Firmament

The Faceless and the Screaming

"Returning now for one last moment to Munch’s painting, it seems evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately disconnects its own aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it. Its gestural content already underscores its own failure, since the realm of the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are incompatible with its medium (something underscored within the work by the homunculus’s lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns, as it were, in a dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward that even more absent experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was itself to "express." Such loops inscribe themselves on the painted surface in the form of those great concentric circles in which sonorous vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on the surface of a sheet of water, in an infinite regress which fans out from the sufferer to become the very geography of a universe in which pain itself now speaks and vibrates through the material sunset and landscape. The visible world now becomes the wall of the monad on which this "scream running through nature" (Munch’s words) is recorded and transcribed: one thinks of that character of Lautreamont who, growing up inside a sealed and silent membrane, ruptures it with his own scream on catching sight of the monstrousness of the deity and thereby rejoins the world of sound and suffering."

 "Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself"

from Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

 Franciszek Starowieyski (Poland) , Poster for Alban Berg's Lulu in Bonn, 1980

Jan Lenica (Poland), Poster for Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Austrian Opera, 1964.

 Pet Halmen, Poster for Alban Berg's Lulu, Bayerische Staatsoper Printed in Munich, 1980s

Poster for Alban Berg's Lulu, Hamburg, 1980s

Roslaw Szaybo (Poland), poster for Alban Berg's Wozzeck,1990s

Sound Comes To The Rescue Of Thought

"Sound comes to the rescue of thought, rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body"

- Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare.

Are You Scared To Die? (Wait For It)

The Scream - Sebastian Cosor - Safe-Frame.com from Sebastian Cosor on Vimeo.


"I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature." - Edvard Munch


"Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible those invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future. This is what is expressed in the phrase "to scream at" -- not to scream before or about but to scream at death -- which suggests this coupling of forces, the perceptible force of the scream and the imperceptible force that makes us scream."  

- Deleuze and Guattari on Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X in Francis Bacon:The Logic Of Sensation 

Bursting Bodies Of Thought // Goltraí Bog Na nDall

Bursting Bodies of Thought: Artaud and Hijikata, by Michael Hornblow:

"In butoh, the body becomes a kind of topological surface, an interface between what may be expressed and some other hidden realm of infinite potential that is ultimately inexpressible....

....

For Artaud.....everything within that matter and thought is inextricably linked along a continuum marked by the interplay of contrary forces....hidden beneath the surface of fact, glossed over by the banality of every day reality, and so it behoves the visionary artist and the radical metaphysician to reveal the lie-- to harness life's hidden force and unleash its cruelty, and an act of creation...."through dissociation and vibratory action upon the sensibility...."

Through a kind of "affective athleticism", the thinking body attempts to apprehend the infinite speed of thought energy in the grasping of a senile hand. What appears is but a shadow, yet one all the more luminous for feeding upon the depths, What may be seen or felt as stage 'presence is perhaps this tension between the virtual and the actual state of resistance in the body; the haunting of some 'thing' glimpsed in the crack of continual metamorphosis..."

"D'iompaigh sé a cheann,

Is do shín amach an lámh sin oilte ar chuardach,

Gach méar ag snámh go mall

Mar mhéaranna ceoltóra ar a uirlis,

Is bhí an uirlis ann

Do sheinn sé ar an aer táin nótaí ciúnais,

Goltraí bog na ndall"

-- ó 'An Dall Sa Studio' le Seán Ó Ríordáin

[He turned his head/And stretched out that hand trained in searching/Every finger swimming slowly/Like a musician's hands on his instrument/And the instrument was there/He played a wealth of silent notes on the air/The slow, sad music of the blind] 

my own rough translation (it's been a while)

Don't Cry...SCREAM!

"One can see this spectre of a soul as if intoxicated by the cries it produces, otherwise how explain Hindu mantras, those consonances, those mysterious rhythms in which the physical undersides of the soul, hunted down to their hiding places come out and tell their secrets to the light of day."

-- Antonin Artaud

Gregory Whitehead: Pressures of the Unspeakable

If you have the forty minutes or so to spare this is an absolutely fascinating radio project on the scream:

http://gregorywhitehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/potu.m4a

Here is the script: http://gregorywhitehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/potuscript.pdf
You can read more about Gregory Whitehead here:

http://gregorywhitehead.net/gw/bio/

Pharmakon -- Body Betrays Itself

"A shriek is more unnerving when it seems to come from a distance, because you can't tell which circle of hell spit it out."   -- Kevin Warwick, chicagoreader.com (read full article here )


See also:

Misha Gordin - New Crowd 62 (2004)

"What is this scream? Who will hear it, this scream that we do not hear? ...

...here the scream literally seems to provoke the silence and in abolishing itself in it, it is tangible that it causes it. It gives rise to it, it allows it to hold its note, it is the 

scream which sustains it and not the silence the scream, the scream in a way makes the silence curl up in the very impasse from which it springs, in order that the silence may escape from it. But it has already happened when we see Munch's image. The scream is traversed by the space of the silence without dwelling in it; they are not linked either by being together or by succeeding one another,the 

scream creates the abyss into which silence rushes."  

-- Lacan on Edvard Munch's The Scream (Der Schrei Der Natur)

Woyzeck, Werner Herzog (1979)

"The waves around thy
mountain,” answered the soothsayer, “rise and rise, the
waves of great distress and affliction: they will soon raise
thy bark also and carry thee away.”—Thereupon was
Zarathustra silent and wondered.—”Dost thou still hear
nothing?” continued the soothsayer: “doth it not rush
and roar out of the depth?”—Zarathustra was silent once
more and listened: then heard he a long, long cry, which
the abysses threw to one another and passed on; for
none of them wished to retain it: so evil did it sound.
“Thou ill announcer,” said Zarathustra at last, “that is
a cry of distress, and the cry of a man; it may come
perhaps out of a black sea. But what doth human distress
matter to me!"  - F.Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra






The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr (2011)

Heartbeat.

Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart

which safely exists in the center of all things?

His giant heartbeat is diverted in us

into little pulses. And his giant grief

is, like his giant jubilation, far too

great for us. And so we tear ourselves away

from him time after time, remaining only

mouths. But unexepectedly and secretly

the giant heartbeat enters our being,

so that we scream ----,

and are transformed in being and in countenance.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

Nancy Spero, "Artaud Painting -- All Writing Is Pigshit," 1969

"It is not I who wants to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of...in short, a spasm"  

"The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering"

- G. Deleuze ('Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation')

"Between the motion

And the act.

    Falls the shadow" 

        - T.S Eliot ('The Hollow Men')

From 'Photographic Portraits from Behind the Canvas' by Luca Pierro (2014)

"Douglas Kahn notes that ‘people who have been in a life-threatening situation often must be told by others that they were screaming’ (2001: 245). In such instances,screams can occur outside of full consciousness – we scream before we ‘know’ that we scream." 

- Marie Thompson, 'Three Screams' in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (2013)