Thanks to researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and elsewhere, we now can hear the music of our minds at work. A chewy feature story in the Hartford Courant today describes the work of Dan Lloyd, who has developed software that assigns pitches to various regions of the brain, as seen in action via functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) scans.
Lloyd has posted this slide-show video on YouTube (9 min.) of one of his experiments. After slides explaining the experiment and how to read the brain scans that follow, the video then begins “playing” scans as electronic notes, with variations in chromatic scale and timing. It reminds me of the ambient music of Brian Eno or Philip Glass (Lloyd’s favorite composer, the Courant’s William Weir reports). The scans are of Lloyd and Trinity students, but “this bebop is inside you, too, every waking moment (and in your dreams, too),” as Lloyd writes in the slide show.
Another video (5:45) shows how brain music might someday be a useful diagnostic tool. Here Lloyd and colleagues set to electronic music the scans of healthy volunteers and of people with schizophrenia. It was hard for me to hear the difference (guess those aural discrimination classes from college have worn off), but the slides show apparent statistical differences among the scans, especially concerning rhythm.
“Hearing” a scan did feel different to me than looking at one. I seemed to have a better sense of the speed at which pixels/pitches were changing. And because the notes were tuned to my Western-music sensibilities, the sounds made me feel sort of warm and fuzzy toward our own very busy brains.
Also cool: Harpist and composer Salla Hakkola at University of Helskinki (Finland!) is transcribing some of the brain scans to use in her own composition.
[a version of this post also appears on the Dana Press blog. See more good stuff there.]
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