You are music (a brainmusic video, converting fMRI data into musical sound)

If you like these videos, visit the website of the independent documentary film maker Elisa da Prato. To check the status of her feature-length film about brains, consciousness, and music (and to support the project), see http://musicofthehemispheres.com/ .
This video is based on a single subject (sound artist Maria Chavez) scanned in the lab of Zoran Josipovic at NYU. Maria was watching an experimental film by Elisa da Prato, which is not show here. Instead, we see two views of her brain, and areas of peak activity, identified by a statistical method known as Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The rising and falling activity of each region is interpreted as if it were sound. Fourier analysis discovers a fundamental frequency and overtones. These frequencies are multiplied, to result in audible sounds. Here, the fundamentals and harmonics are rendered as distinct plucked strings, whose loudness is modulated to match the intensity of activity in the corresponding brain regions. For the first part of the video, only the brain region of greatest activity is rendered. But at about 1:40, the rendering changes to visualize and sonify all the regions. This polyphony is closer to being an accurate depiction of the totality of brain activity in this experiment. It's quite harmonic -- that is a feature intrinsic to the brain signals, an inherent musicality.
The "mind as music" hypothesis finds empirical support in this open source paper:
http://www.frontiersin.org/theoretical_and_philosophical_psychology/10.3389/f...

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Music;
• neuroscience;
• fMRI;
• consciousness;
• cognitive;
• electronica;
• experimental
• music
• Neuroscience
• Control
• Mind
• Brain