[microsound-announce] Music of the Hemispheres -> Nov 29 -> Issue Project Room.

[Elisa Da Prato]

Hello Microsounders,

I would like to invite anyone in the New York area to attend a wild evening
of live music + cognitive science show n tell, on November 29th at Issue
Project Room. The event is toward my ongoing film, Music of the
Hemispheres. The film is an investigation into philosopher Dan Lloyd's
theory that consciousness operates within a musical structure. A working
hypothesis he has formulated through taking fMRI generated brain data and
converting it into musical scores. Read more about the film here:
http://elisadaprato.com/music-of-the-hemispheres

This night commences our first custom, experimental neuro-scientific study
specifically playing with musical imagination, generating data sets to be
rendered musically live on this night.

See complete event description below, and read more about the event here:
http://www.issueprojectroom.org/2011/11/07/music-of-the-hemispheres-a-live-music-film-and-science-event/

I hope you can join us.

Cheers,
Elisa

----

*MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES*



A Live Music, Film, and Science Event

Tuesday, November 29, 8:00pm at Issue Project Room. $15

(232 3rd St, 3rd Floor, Gowanus, Brooklyn)



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.



The Evening’s Schedule:

   1. Short Film by Elisa Da Prato, surveying the players, and theories.
   2. Dan Lloyd’s presentation of subject Maria Chavez’s “Brain Music.”
   3. Yarn/Wire performance of *Passagework* by composer Aaron Einbond for
   two prepared pianos and two percussionists.
   4. Yarn/Wire and Aaron Einbond on live electronics to perform Alvin
   Lucier’s *Memory Space.*
   5. 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 of event 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.
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