A multi-sensory film + art + science extravaganza, the idea for which originates in the work of neuro-philosopher Dan Lloyd, whose research focuses on taking patterns found in brain activity and converting them into musical scores. These scores are not biofeedback or music cognition experiments, but rather, they extract the “architecture of consciousness,” as it occurs in the brain, and assign its varying components musical tones. The result is musical scores meant to reflect brain activity itself. Through this, Lloyd found that recognizable musical structures emerge, and he thus formulated a theory that consciousness operates within a musical structure—or rather, that music is an expressive interpretation of how our brains work.
Aaron Einbond is a composer and music theorist whose work centers on the exploration of timbre space. He has developed a beautiful and provocative compositional method of transcribing naturally occurring sound environments, such as a rainstorm, café, or covered passageway, and creating musical transcriptions for live instrumentation intended to place the listener in the midst of a virtual space of sound simulating an immersion in timbre space. What if the space simulated were not of a passageway or rainfall, but rather the human mind?
Thus, a unique and musical fMRI experiment has been formulated through a collaboration between Lloyd, Einbond, neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic, and filmmaker Elisa Da Prato, wherein a subject was prompted to imagine and listen to the very same sound samples used in Einbond’s technique. Sound artist Maria Chavez has offered herself as subject, and mind as instrument through which Lloyd will present a piece of Brain Music representative of her cognitive experience. This to be followed by live performance by piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, who will perform two pieces: Einbond’s Passagework, created with the aforementioned technique, and a new interpretation of bio-music pioneer Alvin Lucier’s Memory Space, a score instructing performers to improvise while listening to recordings of outside spaces.
The evening will open with a short film, directed by Elisa Da Prato, who initiated the event and is currently working on a feature-length film examining Dan Lloyd’s Mind As Music theory. The short film will break down the various compositional techniques employed, the documentation of Chavez’s brain scans, and the premise of Lloyd’s theory.
Da Prato states her goal is to create a seamless submersion into a rabbit hole of different layers of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, compositional process, and musical experience—to experience the transmission of the same source material through the various mediums of notated composition, improvisation, and the human mind and dually the transubstantiation of person into music.
- Short Film by Elisa Da Prato, surveying the players, and theories.
- Dan Lloyd presents on Maria Chavez’s “Brain Music.”
- Yarn/Wire perform Passagework by composer Aaron Einbond for two prepared pianos and two percussionists.
- Yarn/Wire and Aaron Einbond on live electronics to perform Alvin Lucier’s Memory Space.
- Q&A with panel mediated by filmmaker Elisa Da Prato: philosopher Dan Lloyd, neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic, composer Aaron Einbond, subject Maria Chavez.
Total running time approximately 75 minutes.
DAN LLOYD is Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004) and Simple Minds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989). His current projects include Ghosts in the Machine (Rowan and Littlefield, forthcoming), a philosophical drama about minds, brains, and computers, and Subjective Time (The MIT Press, forthcoming), an anthology on the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of experienced temporality. He was the first recipient of the “New Perspectives in fMRI Research Award” (given by the fMRI Data Center and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience), and recently received a Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Helsinki, Finland. In the 2010-2011 academic year he was a visiting scholar at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. His work on “Mind as Music” appears in the open source journal Frontiers in Psychology.
AARON EINBOND’s work explores the intersection of composition, computer music, music perception, field recording, and sound installation. He was born in New York in 1978 and has studied at Harvard, the University of Cambridge, the University of California Berkeley, and IRCAM in Paris. His teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion, and Philippe Leroux. From 2009–2011, he was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University. Recent and upcoming projects include a Concertare 2011 commission for Ensemble Recherche and the Freiburger Barockorchester and a Fromm Commission for Ensemble Dal Niente.
ZORAN JOSIPOVIC, PhD, is a Research Associate and an Adjunct Professor in the Psychology Department and Center for Neural Science, New York University. His research focuses on the effects of meditation and other contemplative techniques on the brain, and on what these effects can tell us about the nature of consciousness. Zoran is a long-term practitioner of meditation in the nondual traditions of Dzogchen, Mahamudra, and Advaita Vedanta. He has also worked as a psychotherapist and a bodyworker and has taught meditation at Esalen Institute for many years.
YARN/WIRE is a quartet of two percussionists and two pianists. This instrumental combination allows the ensemble flexibility to slip effortlessly between classics of the repertoire and more modern works that continue to forge new boundaries. Founded in 2005, Yarn/Wire is admired for the energy and precision they bring to vital performances of today's most adventurous music. The results of Yarn/Wire’s collaborative initiatives are pointing towards the emergence of a new and lasting repertoire, and partnerships with genre-bending artists such as Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf and David Bithell have led to the creation of work that is “spare and strange and very, very new.” (Time Out NY)
MARIA CHAVEZ’s sound installations and live performances have focused on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art. Her work has been recognized by the Jerome Foundation, which awarded her the Emerging Artist Grant by New York’s Roulette Intermedium in 2008. In 2009, she became a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship, which is generously offered to young sound artists by The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust. She has traveled extensively, sharing the stage with Pauline Oliveros, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Phil Niblock, and Otomo Yoshihide to name just a few. She has performed in venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum in Bordeaux, France; the Akademies der Kunste in both Vienna and Berlin; and Sonoteca in Lima, Peru.
ELISA DA PRATO is a filmmaker exploring music, sex, and science in various incarnations of short form, experimental, documentary, and narrative work. She edited the documentary film Keep Dancing, which was featured in several festivals internationally. Her work was screened at various venues and galleries in NYC, including Invisible Dog Gallery, Issue Project Room, Market Hotel, and Zero Film Fest, and has been featured with such outfits as K Records, East Village Radio, La Blogothéque, Index Magazine. She is a featured regular artist on The Black Harbor.com. Da Prato is currently directing a non-fiction feature-length film examining the potential musical structure of consciousness, and curating live music/cinema events challenging that theory. She also directs an ongoing project of motion picture portraiture, and has performed once as a stand-up comedian.