Mind as Music
Using the sonification of brain data, it is possible to hear the difference between a healthy subject and a patient with schizophrenia:
It is also possible to hear how the brain activity of someone with dementia sounds:
Thus, it is possible to hear someone thinking. Actually, as Josipovic points out, this is "an overstatement. [...] the analysis that selects the networks which you hear as individual tones does not isolate only the thinking activity, but includes all of the brain's activity, both conscious and unconscious, thinking, feeling, perceiving, as well as the spontaneous activity involved in the brain's self-maintenance, such as memory, etc. So you could say: 'it is possible to hear the state of one's brain'" (Josipovic 2013).
Lloyd is interested in what might be called the musicality of thought. He argues that sonifying brain activity allows us to hear the sound of a person's consciousness. If this is true, I am listening to Chavez's consciousness. Actually, I am listening to a portrait of Chavez's thinking. Lloyd's sonifications, together with their accompanying visualizations, are a new form of portraiture.
It is also possible to hear how the brain activity of someone with dementia sounds:
Thus, it is possible to hear someone thinking. Actually, as Josipovic points out, this is "an overstatement. [...] the analysis that selects the networks which you hear as individual tones does not isolate only the thinking activity, but includes all of the brain's activity, both conscious and unconscious, thinking, feeling, perceiving, as well as the spontaneous activity involved in the brain's self-maintenance, such as memory, etc. So you could say: 'it is possible to hear the state of one's brain'" (Josipovic 2013).
Lloyd is interested in what might be called the musicality of thought. He argues that sonifying brain activity allows us to hear the sound of a person's consciousness. If this is true, I am listening to Chavez's consciousness. Actually, I am listening to a portrait of Chavez's thinking. Lloyd's sonifications, together with their accompanying visualizations, are a new form of portraiture.
They are also a new way of understanding spectatorship. Analyses of spectatorship in theatre and performance studies have drawn primarily from reception and reader-response theories in literary and cultural studies. This body of work contends that the meanings of a text are "neither manifested in the printed text, nor produced solely by the reader’s imagination" (Iser 1978: 135) but are generated from a synthesis of the two. This dispels the notion that there is a single, timeless, objective, sui generis, independent meaning of a text and introduces the notion of reader agency: the idea that a reader actively negotiates and interprets rather than passively receives a text. Stanley Fish subverted the authority of the text by pointing out that readers bring interpretive strategies to a text that exist "prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read" (1980: 171). Fish and Wolfgang Iser focused on the responses of individual readers, which led to the idea that there are as many readings of a text as there are readers, and consequently that all readings are subjective and therefore arbitrary. However, Hans Robert Jauss, who located the reader in history, pointed out that the reception of a text is neither arbitrary nor subjective but "a process of directed perception" that is shaped by a "horizon of expectations" (1982: 23), which is in turn determined by a reader’s cultural background, aesthetic expectations, personal experiences, class, gender, sexuality, political motivations, and the historical moment in which she lives. Although "the text" is now widely used to refer more generally to work in numerous media, reception theory reflects its origins in the study of written text, and has had limited application to performance, an inherently multimedia and multidisciplinary genre requiring multiple cognitive strategies for making meaning. Lloyd’s "Mind as Music" theory, and his sonifications, give us a performance-driven model for understanding spectatorship.
Music of the Hemispheres is a concert, a film, a portrait, an improv, and a performed (neural) performance analysis of the way Chavez saw and heard the stimulus film.
Music of the Hemispheres is a concert, a film, a portrait, an improv, and a performed (neural) performance analysis of the way Chavez saw and heard the stimulus film.
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