I am listening to music that has been composed by sonifying a series of  fMRI scans of performance artist Maria Chavez that were taken as she watched a stimulus film instructing her to imagine the sound of rain, listen to a recording of rain, and listen to a musical composition about rain by Aaron Einbond, which included samples of actual rain sounds. These instructions were also given onscreen, so I am hearing a sonification of Chavez's brain's response to what she saw and heard. Chavez's scans were then sonified by neurophilosopher Dan Lloyd.

What I am listening to is a sonification of Chavez's brain activity as she engages in an act of spectatorship. You could say that I am hearing her act of spectatorship: I am listening to her act of listening-seeing. The speakers in the room -- at the Issue Project Room, a performance space in Brooklyn, NY -- are positioned so that I can spatially experience the blood flow in her brain (a way of measuring neural activity): the speakers in the front of the room (left and right) play music generated by activity in the frontal lobes of her brain; the next two are the temporal lobes; then the parietal lobes; and finally, at the back of the space, the occipital lobe. I am sitting in Maria Chavez's head, listening to her brain play.

I am interested in Music of the Hemispheres, a presentation of sonified brain activity generated in response to both visual and aural stimuli, for what we can learn about spectatorship. However, the concert can be seen in other ways as well. First, it can be seen "simply" as the performance of a musical composition in which Chavez's brain is a performer improvising its response to the stimulus film, which is analogous to another player. Her brain's improvisation is then "amplified" through the process of sonification so we can hear it, and shown onscreen so we can see it. Second, the sonifications can be seen as an aural portrait of Chavez -- not unlike portraits composed by Virgil Thompson or Erik Satie, except that this is a self-portrait of Chavez's brain activity composed by her brain. Futhermore, the visualizations Lloyd created of her brain activity can be seen as a visual portrait. Additionally, neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic, who conducted the fMRI scans, notes that the data obtained from the scans can be used to analyze the way human beings respond to an image of the self as opposed to an image of another. Finally, neurophilosopher Dan Lloyd sees the sonifications as a way of understanding consciousness.