Your brain waves on music: A night of technology, music, philosophy and neuroscience in Brooklyn

Music explores the spaces between silence and noise, between thought and feeling, between the concrete and the abstract, between the real and the unreal.  We spend our lives negotiating these inbetweens, and music of all sorts reminds us of the limitless meanings of life and the endless variations of human experience.

Dan Lloyd

And through music, perhaps the most accessible and direct form of art, one Brooklyn based documentary filmmaker, one Philosophy professor from CT, one NYU Scientist and his research subject, and a band from San Francisco have found a new way to understand neuroscience.

If your intellectual interests lie within the realm of technology, music, philosophy or neuroscience then I, Robot Girl, highly suggest you attend the upcoming event, “Music of the Hemispheres. Think of it as an event similar to a social science experiment involving scientists, philosophers, musicians and you, the audience on Wednesday, April 28^th, 2010 at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY.

The evening will begin with a short film by Elisa da Prato, a Brooklyn based documentary filmmaker, explaining the basis behind the event’s intersection of philosophy, neuroscience and music theory, a study developed by Dan Lloyd, a tenured Philosophy professor and Neuroscience faculty member at Trinity College. Da Prato’s film explores the “tender honey” overlap of philosophy, neuroscience and music theory through the lens of Lloyd’s work with data visualization.

“Essentially the brain is a mapping machine,” says Da Prato. “I’m sitting in this chair. I’m on Skype. I am 27. The brain is constantly mapping to create phenomenon just like an artist is mapping phenomenon on a canvas, film, or into poetry or a piece of music.”

“Ever since the first crude brain images appeared on the cover of Scientific American (1978) I’ve had a gut feeling that the ancient questions of philosophy — about mind, perception, and consciousness — would have to be informed by neuroscience,” says Lloyd. Lloyd began studying neuroimaging in the mid 90s and in 2000 he began using “Virtual Reality Markup Language” (VRML) to make maps of the mind. After looking at the data depicting brain activity, the neurophilosopher began asking questions like – how does consciousness arise in the brain? In order to better answer these questions, he learned Matlab, a computer programming language in order to handle the data himself.

On a very hot night about seven years ago it occurred to Lloyd that the data he’d been trying to visualize might also be turned into sound and that hearing the data might have advantages over simply viewing complex and layered data. “What if I sonify this data as opposed to visualize it?” he said. He soon theorized that consciousness may operate in a musical structure or perhaps music operates in a conscious structure. Since then he’s been trying to create musical interpretations that reveal something about brain function and are beautiful at the same time.

The music in this video is slightly creepy, but its melodious nature is easy on the ears, perhaps literally, since the composer of this music is essentially a human brain. The video shows data from a brain scan converted to a sonified visualization. What it shows are musical notes whose pitch corresponds to the magnitude of the brain’s activity detected by functional MRI.

According to Lloyd, each image corresponds to each chord per second. He describes the visual as a “brain cube” with three views of the same brain projected onto three sides of a box. The brain cube provides an approximate location of activity in the brain. Lloyd then assigns each area of the brain to a different musical instrument. Pitches are restricted to a “blues” scale. The pitch for each activity area rises in proportion to the signal’s intensity. Lloyd writes, “that many areas of the brain are active at all times and at various time scales. In this one, the scientific moral is at best impressionistic; the main goal is to make something beautiful.”

In late 2009, Da Prato introduced NYU Scientist Dr. Zoran Josipovic to Lloyd. In February 2010, Josipovic sent subject Jeff Sable, (a good friend of Da Prato’s and a graduate of the NYU’s Tisch ITP program), through an fMRI scanner and asked him to meditate while viewing different visual stimulus. His brain activity was recorded and Josipovic shared his data with Lloyd who sonified the data and extrapolated its “musical score.” The data was then passed on to San Francisco based ensemble, The Lickets, who were assigned with the task of composing two pieces: the first, a musical reaction to the stimulus Sable was given during the scan; the second, their live rendering of Lloyd’s “score.”

Essentially, you will hear Jeff Sable’s brain as a piece of music. A grand question Da Prato hopes to address at the event is “Is this music?” Because, typically, you can sonify anything. The answer will hopefully come from The Lickets, an acoustical mini-orchestra.

A panel discussion will follow featuring Dan Lloyd, Zoran Josipovic, Doug Johnson (composer/theorist/music therapist), The Lickets (Mitch Greer & Rachel Smith), Jeff Sable (the subject), moderated by Elisa Da Prato. The night will end with a full-on Lickets jam session.

“Dan is lovely, enigmatic and has a wholesome, joyous approach to his research,” says Da Prato, who began working with Lloyd in November 2009. She stumbled upon Lloyd’s work while reading an article about him in the New Scientist and asked him for an interview. “It was total love at first sight, or sound,” she said. “On the drive up to CT to meet and interview him, I was already thinking that if we got along, and he seemed open, I wanted to expand this into a film.” “Now,” she says excitedly, “We are shooting this thing asshole to elbow.” Da Prato is currently working on a full length feature documentary on Lloyd’s work.

Lloyd hopes his research may have far reaching implications in the field of medicine. For instance, “What does a schizophrenic brain sound like versus a normal brain? Is anxiety a form of arrhythmia? Could there be possibilities of music therapy for victims of stroke, aneurisms and Alzheimer’s?

“Potentially,” says Lloyd, “Some rendering of the brain into sound could be a diagnostic probe that clinicians could use for clues to underlying conditions, just as a doctor might use a stethoscope to detect a heart murmur. But the path to an application like this will require more understanding of the relationships between complexity of brain function and the way we hear and interpret complex sound.  Meanwhile, the music of the hemispheres remind us that within each of us there is always a symphony of awareness.”

Lloyd and Da Prato’s work was recently featured in Index Magazine.

More information about the event can be found at the Issue project room and on Facebook.

“We want this event to be accessible to people” says Da Prato, “Carnegie hall has its place, but this is going to be something fun.” The event will explore the idea that we are, in fact, music – or that music is, in fact, truly human: a reflection or interpretation of the human mind.

Date:             Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Time:             8:00pm – 11:00pm

Location: Issue Project Room

Street: 232 3rd St, 3rd Floor

City/Town: Brooklyn, NY

$10 – tickets available here: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/8004975

Beer/Wine Provided.

http://www.myspace.com/thelickets