 Please go ahead, chemical atom. Thank you very much. Yeah, can I just check? We have sound from the computer. We'll know when it sounds terrible. Let's just let that build for a moment. Good afternoon, everybody, or perhaps good morning. What you're listening to is a piece of what I like to call research-driven dance music, which is music that I create, which is often embedded with psychoacoustic tricks. In this case, it is a combination of what's known as a shepherd-risse glissando, which sometimes is called the audio barber pole, in that it creates the illusion of an infinitely rising or falling tone by layering and replacing, changing the timbre of the sound in such a way that you can't tell it's just a short loop that gives the illusion of it infinitely rising, which is useful in some cases. For instance, we were doing a generative dance music project for Science Museum Lates with our friend LJ Rich and Emmy, who's in the audience here also, about creating interactive installations for music where you were performing, but also reacting to a stream of data that you were receiving. In our case, we were trying to calculate something that LJ dubbed the wiggle index, which would take the accelerometer data from people's phones as they danced to the music that was playing. But we also wanted to be able to give people some interaction, because also if you want to keep getting the stream of accelerometer data, you have to keep something on the screen touched. So we had to give people buttons to interact with, even if the buttons didn't always actually do something. But you could also let people vote for when they wanted the drop in the track to kick in. So we had to be able to give them a build that was infinitely long, theoretically, in case no one ever voted for the drop. And as it happened, our Wi-Fi network fell down colossally. So we never got enough votes to trigger the drop via the methodology that we had meant to. So instead, we went to, I think, a very roundabout kind of hand counting method. Throw your arms in the air when you want the drop. And there was one poor chap who, on the end of the BBC segment that they made about it, is just pictured in the middle wanting it while we just play this infinitely rising tone. But yeah, it turns out the same data that you use to create those tones you can use in other interesting ways, like creating the layered sound of reverbs. And instead of increasing the pitch of something and then gradually fading it out and replacing it with a lower one to continue the illusion of it rising, you could have the reverb of a space that gets infinitely larger and larger, which is especially useful if you do VR, audio in games, anything where you have access to, like, binaural audio or access to the position of the listener's head. I've been luckily asked to do an artist residency at a place that has what they describe as a 4D sound system. Don't get me started on that name. But unlike the other surround sound speaker systems I had played on, which usually would be either eight speakers around you or otherwise long, flat planes of speakers in front of and behind you or just a single wall in an XY grid of addressable speakers, like our Science Museum piece. But instead now it has 16 columns of speakers around you in a 4x4 grid with speakers at three heights inside them and then nine subwoofers under the floor. So it's 48.9 channels surround. And you can not only move the sounds around you, but also towards and away from you in a way that's been very interesting to me to work with. When I say somatosensory music, as the one of four slides I have prepared, we'll show you. I'm interested in the physical sensation of sound as much as the acoustic sensation of sound. From meeting a very interesting character who I think we first introduced when they asked to use a piece of my music on a sub pack commercial, sub pack make wearable subwoofers that sometimes are used in gaming or for other kind of places where you would want some physical sound. But it turns out they're very useful also for things like drummers and bass players to be able to hear each other and feel the low frequencies of each other's music when they're being the rhythm section of a band. But then it turns out that if you are someone who is profoundly deaf and experiences sound only through the physical sensation of it, there's actually a huge awesome deaf clubbing scene. And if you make friends with some of those awesome people, they will always know where in town has the best sound system. So make friends with those people. And at the time I knew this person as a dancer and they then became a choreographer and moved from choreographer to thinking, ah, you know what, I actually think I wanna pick the music to DJ and then finally, you know what, actually I think I want to pick everything about the music and they're now a music producer who has been profoundly deaf since birth and they produce, perform and dance to music that they have never heard. And I think that is absolutely amazing. But we started to think in response to what Jacob was doing, how would you get over problems like beat matching? If you're a DJ and you want to introduce a track in sync with the one that's currently playing, you might see people slipping one headphone on and off. Don't have that option if your only perception of sound is through a loud speaker system pointed at you. So we were trying to think of ways, including trying using the sub pack and other wearable based transducer devices so that people could feel the beat of a track that wasn't currently being played out of that same loud sound system. But it turns out that it's pretty difficult to do that in a way that's always perceivable in the way that a loud pair of headphones is, like those ones that all the DJs are gradually losing their sense of hearing to. But it turns out that there is a great thing that approximates sound in an interesting way. It is called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. You may have seen devices like this. They're marketed for pain relief. I think they get some kind of use within the BDSM community. But they, yeah, also if you see things like an ab belt that it's like, hey, wear this belt and you're gonna get a six pack with zero effort. The way you get that is by it electrocuting you and forcing your muscles to contract. So you do exercise without effort, but it will still hurt you. But it turns out that humans, like, how many senses do we have? Share a number out. There were some numbers close to the right number there. Also, of course, like we're at a hacker convention. There's probably lots of augmented people here. I just recently had a magnet implanted into my hand so that I have magneto perception now and can feel electrical currents inside wires as well as pick things up or hold tiny screws while repairing something. But yeah, I mean, so we have sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, proprioception, more. But it turns out that your electroception also is quite acute and if you play a 200 hertz sine wave into your body electrically, it sounds quite convincingly. I even said it then, it doesn't sound. It feels quite convincingly as though you're stood in front of a loud speaker system playing a 200 hertz sine wave at you. And it's quite surreal to be able to put things together like binaural beats. Playing one frequency in one ear and a slightly different frequency in the other ear can make your brainwave activity synchronized to the difference between those frequencies. And it's sometimes used to induce states of meditation or lucid dreaming and stuff. But you can do that between your senses also using the Ganzfeld effect. You see people sometimes doing things with like half a ping pong ball over each eye so you have a uniformly blank field of vision. And then strobing lights at those and if you play one frequency to your ears and a different frequency to your eyes now instead of the waves and electrical activity going from one hemisphere of your brain to the other they go from your visual to your auditory cortex and make you feel like you're gonna fall over. So I was very interested to discover that you can use 10s to do something that feels like you're playing sound very loudly. We came across this when working on a hack for a CTM festival. I don't really have Windows NT, by the way. That's just my desktop background. Yeah, we were working, there's a music hack lab that happens at Club Transmediale in Germany each year run by Peter Kern of Create Digital Music. And we were working on a project for that called We Suffer For Our Art, which was commentary on the difference between performing kind of playback based or clip triggering electronic music or playing a physical instrument and the idea that if you have like a tangible emotional connection to a piece of music it will come out in the way you physically perform it. But that doesn't matter if you're just hitting clip triggers in Ableton. So we set up a device as such that if you wanted to be able to trigger the louder, faster, more intense sections of music you had to be willing to suffer longer and more powerful electric shocks. And then taking EMG readings from our bodies to measure the physical sort of intensity with which we were having to fight against the muscle contractions caused by the tennis machine shocks and the more intensely we were physically fighting in order to be able to still perform the more bright and intense the projected visuals became blasting white noise at the audience across a very large screen so that they too could share our pain. So I've been doing lots of weird stuff, as you can tell. Some probably slightly more family friendly than others as when you get into the, yes maybe just pop your hands over their ears for a moment. Maybe if you're interested in how sound affects people's bodies you'll end up thinking about how vibration affects people's bodies which takes you down a whole sex toy route. And before you know it maybe you're taking augmented reality sound art installations around events and parties such as my popular past items, the base orgasm machines version one, two and three. Free and open source, you can build one yourself. Come talk to me about it later maybe. Because there turned out to be more of a crossover between these different areas than I expected. If you want to find something that will feel like a physically nice sensation, a good way to prototype that it seems is to find an extremely sensitive part of someone's body and see if it feels nice there and then you can extrapolate out that the patterns people think feel pleasant or interesting for one sense usually crossed to the other. And that's why we start to add those senses together. So thinking about accessibility, I was thinking about the nature of AV performances and the other stuff we were doing in this surround sound venue I was speaking about such as sleepover concerts where with the subwoofers under the floor you have a great opportunity to just mildly oscillate people in a way that's interesting to them and encourage them to just sleep, dream there, have a soundtrack played by you. It's, first of all, something that I thought was really strange but maybe living in Berlin has affected me. Either music now has kick drums everywhere or no rhythm whatsoever. But I was starting to think about the nature of these AV performances and the accessibility of them. If any of you know my work from other conferences or festivals and stuff, you'll often find me running hackathon there, usually themed around music and art but often with an accessibility angle. Things like creating 3D printed prostheses for people to have a guitar playing hand in place of their usual prosthetic hand and stuff like that, which I find super enriching and yeah, I've met all kinds of cool people in those fields and then ended up working with other people who were making interesting comments about accessibility and enabling themselves with assistive devices that could be seen as an extension of the body rather than just a replacement for something. For instance, maybe you've seen the work of this fabulous person. Victoria Modesta is a self-described amputee model and pop star who has, you'll often find with a range of fantastic designed prosthetic limbs such as the one in this piece, which was for a shoot that we did for Make Magazine and I think then later in Wired with a 3D printed human leg bone replica inside transparent plastic with a propylene glycol smoke machine which was excellent and a molded carbon fiber body suit with which I was monitoring the position, movement orientation and temperature of Victoria's body as well as her pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation through an earlobe mounted sensor so that we could just make generative music that wasn't being performed by the person who was generating it, but just that their movement and their body was naturally going to generate it. And that was a super fun piece to work on. You can see here the sensor I was talking about on the earlobe, which is great unless you've filled your earlobes with other stuff like I have. But yeah, so using signals from the body to generate music and then kind of measuring how the music affects your body and making these weird interesting feedback loops has become a big part of my work and I could do lots of data-driven stuff such as this piece, which I was invited with a bunch of other artists to use the data from the first LSD brain imaging study which happened at the Neuropsychopharmacology Department at Imperial College London and to take the recorded MEG data of test subjects who were under the influence of LSD and use that to create pieces of sound art which is the sound you're hearing now which I created on a team with two other amazing creative scientists and then accompanied that with visuals created from my own brain scans. I'm going to turn it down a little bit, believe it playing. So now, if anyone has had scans of any kind done, get copies of your scans. They will send you those on a DVD and they're super interesting. There's free open source software you can use to make visualizations like this and look at the inside of your own body you'll get data from it. And yeah, and if you have access to that kind of information, why not use it to make something weird like this? So continuing in my vein of data-driven artworks I also was working recently with images made from 3D constructs of the CRISPR-Cas9 protein because lots of people are super excited about that if you're into genome editing stuff which, yeah, I mean making cool stuff like this, rotating the molecules of things that we're interested in. Any chemistry nerds here? Chemical Adam on their own, boo. You're all missing out, chemistry's great. I'm gonna jump through this a little bit because we moved from the sound created first from patients under placebo being scanned. We're using 400 channels of magneto encephalography. So we had a 10 minute scan of each patient, of the one selected patient under placebo and then a 10 minute scan under LSD and then you can hear how we attempted to maybe convey some of that LSD experience by putting brains through kaleidoscopes. Because really, what can we say LSD does if it doesn't put your brain through a kaleidoscope? Anyway, any questions so far? I'd like to kind of keep it slightly conversational, you know what I mean? Over here, you can shout or you can wait for a mic. We won't judge you. We believe in you, microphone, you can do it. You talked about open source software, which one and where can I find it? So there's an excellent piece of software called Slicer. I think it is just on slicer.org even. There's also another free to use but closed source viewer called OSIRIX, which is something slightly closer to the viewer they would use to view DICOM or other scan images in hospital itself. And Slicer is more like if you want to do interesting stuff like go from your scan to a 3D print to print a copy of your head, which why haven't I done that yet? Keep noticing that all of my art is about heads and faces a lot. Maybe because I'm a huge narcissist. And had lots of weird interesting brain stuff happen that led me to have these scans. Had a stroke, I've died, I've been in a coma. And Slic let me to think about interesting stuff, but we can talk more about that later. There was another question on this side. Another question over here. Thanks, hi, so you're talking about using auditory and visual stimulation at the same time. So there's a magnificent way of creating motion sickness in people by messing with their vestibular system and their visual system at the same time. So have you just ended up making lots of people very motion sick? So we did have some incidents with things like playing sine waves, but then modulating the position of them in space using a slightly different frequency sine wave that if you were to stand within the field of those, because with your eyes shut, people's, it seems to make your inner ear want to automatically correct your position. So with their eyes closed, people would start doing this and eventually fall down. And we couldn't put a map there because then they would know they were supposed to fall down and it's like you get into this whole ethical don't make people fall over thing. But you know, you want to make an omelette. Another question right here. I have a number of MRI scans on a regular basis and I quite enjoy the noises that it makes. Have you ever thought about doing anything with the noise that the machine machines actually make? You got me earlier. Those sleepover concerts I was sounding, they probably sound quite a lot like an MRI machine to be fair. Yeah, I've had a lot of MRIs too. The sound is, if you ever have to have a really long one or fMRI scans done especially, it's sometimes hard to stay awake, I find. But five minute warning, okay, thank you. But yes, you can do interesting stuff with MRIs. Some of these images were from Compound MRI and CT scan. And yeah, you can do interesting stuff, make a 3D model of your head with everything except the bones in it and get into some weird stuff like that. But yeah, absolutely, have a look. Maybe OSIRIC's probably slightly better to start with which, yeah, like I said, it's free if you're not using it commercially and has a big like, not for medical use on it unless you pay for a license, but it's great, I can show you how to use it if you'd like. Another question down here. Thank you also to anyone who came and caught my live set in here last night. That was quite a party. They have got some serious lasing in here. Yeah, there's a question at the front here. I can hear you from here, it's okay, I'll repeat the question so everyone else can hear it. So the technician probably won't be able to help you, but you can request at the time that they send you a copy of it, but also as long as it remains in your medical records, you're allowed to ask for copies of them, which is why I have cool stuff like this X-ray of my hand with my RFID chip inside it, which is on this side and then the magnet on the other side, which I don't have a scan with the magnet in yet. And I'm told now that I can still have MRIs, but only in a machine that generates less than 11 gauss of magnetic field or otherwise. I was like, why will it pull the magnet out? No, it will oscillate the magnet and it will catch fire inside you. Where's the RFID? I have had no problems with, someone asked me, how was the magnet going through airport security? And I was like, I have a lot of metal on my body. It didn't make any difference. And the chip hasn't, yeah, it has shown up on an X-ray, but I haven't had another MRI yet since I got my chip installed, but I'll be interested to see what they look like if I have that opportunity. Did I finish what I was talking about? Thank God for Modafinil, hey. I think maybe, oh, there's another at the back here. Maybe it was, my chip is not that useful in everyday use anyway. It's more of an art project in that it contains code for a piece of infinitely long generative dance music accompanied within the code by a poem about the experience of ego death under the influence of nitrous oxide. Because I wanted to use exactly the 888 bytes of storage in the most interesting way possible and I was enjoying kind of demo scene and stuff and like, how long and interesting a thing can you fit into this many bytes? Which, so now it's a piece of music that exists in basically every medium other than a recording as it exists as code, as an image on the internet, as an installation as I built a piece that I go and place the code on and then I can perform and evaluate it. It executes in Sonic Pi, which is a great live coding language that comes pre-installed on Raspberry Pi's default operating system and everyone should know about and use. Yeah, and then within Sonic Pi it has also in the comments that the poem I was talking about. Take a look at my website if you want to see more stuff like that anyway. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's just a very quick one. Which type of chip is it that you've got installed, the RFID? NTAG216, yeah, Combination NFC RFID. I found it doesn't work on the RFID game that's on site here because I used all of the 888 bytes. Thank you. Yeah, I used all 888 bytes, including the bit that should be like the declaration of, hey, this is what kind of device I am. Talk to me like this. No, I used it all for dance music. Treated also with effects that simulate the auditory hallucinations induced by the aforementioned substance. But yeah, take a look at adamjohnwilliams.co.uk slash videos and there's probably some more stuff in that kind of vein if you'd like to see that anyway. All good. Let's chat more outside afterwards. I'm going for a fucking cigarette. Thank you, everybody.