Hello Microsounders, <br><br>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: <a href="http://elisadaprato.com/music-of-the-hemispheres">http://elisadaprato.com/music-of-the-hemispheres</a><br>
<br>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. <br><br>See complete event description below, and read more about the event here: <a href="http://www.issueprojectroom.org/2011/11/07/music-of-the-hemispheres-a-live-music-film-and-science-event/">http://www.issueprojectroom.org/2011/11/07/music-of-the-hemispheres-a-live-music-film-and-science-event/</a><br>
<br>I hope you can join us. <br><br>Cheers,<br>Elisa<br><br>----<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Cambria;">MUSIC OF
THE HEMISPHERES</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">A Live Music, Film, and Science Event</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Tuesday, November 29, 8:00pm at Issue Project Room. $15</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">(232 3rd St, 3rd Floor, Gowanus, Brooklyn)</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">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. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">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<i>.</i> What if the space simulated
were not of a passageway or rainfall, but rather the human mind? </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">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 <i>Brain
Music</i> 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 <i>Passagework</i>,
created with the aforementioned technique, and a new interpretation of
bio-music pioneer Alvin Lucier’s <i>Memory
Space</i>, a score instructing performers to improvise while listening to
recordings of outside spaces.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">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. </span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">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.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">The Evening’s Schedule:</span></font></p>
<ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Short
Film by Elisa Da Prato, surveying the players, and theories. </span></font></li><li class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Dan
Lloyd’s presentation of subject Maria Chavez’s “Brain Music.” </span></font></li><li class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Yarn/Wire
performance of <i>Passagework</i> by
composer Aaron Einbond for two prepared pianos and two percussionists. </span></font></li><li class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Yarn/Wire
and Aaron Einbond on live electronics to perform Alvin Lucier’s <i>Memory Space.</i> </span></font></li><li class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Q&A
with panel mediated by filmmaker Elisa Da Prato: philosopher Dan Lloyd,
neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic, composer Aaron Einbond, subject Maria
Chavez. </span></font></li></ol>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Total running time of event approximately 75 minutes. </span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Cambria;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">DAN LLOYD</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> is
Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the
Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of
<i>Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness</i> (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2004) and <i>Simple Minds</i>
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989). His current projects include <i>Ghosts in the Machine</i> (Rowan and
Littlefield, forthcoming), a philosophical drama about minds, brains, and
computers, and <i>Subjective Time</i> (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 <i>Frontiers in Psychology</i>. </span></font></p>
<p><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">AARON
EINBOND</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">’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.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">ZORAN
JOSIPOVIC, PhD</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">, 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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">YARN/WIRE</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> 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)</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">MARIA
CHAVEZ</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">’s<b> </b>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. </span></font></p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<p><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Cambria;">ELISA DA PRATO</span></b><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> is a
filmmaker exploring music, sex, and science in various incarnations of short
form, experimental, documentary, and narrative work. She edited the documentary
film <i>Keep Dancing</i>, 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. </span></font><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Cambria;"></span></p>
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