Composing the Actual: Brainwave Sonification as Materialized Intensity of Virtual Relations

Abstract

My recently performed experimental music performance I Sit and Worry About Her comprises a transdisciplinary research project that explores the function of large-scale cortical networks and application of EEG, monitoring the brainwaves in music making and perceiving. The project aims at understanding the activity of the brain and its electric impulses as an affect or intensity of virtual relations. There are several assemblages that relate rhizomatically in different dimensions inside an event; from minor gestures in the brain’s electric impulse continuum, its self-enjoyment and experience of sound frequencies, to the affective modality that creates authentic collective identity during the performance, thus questioning the unity of movement between subject and object. The project involves playing pre-recorded music content back to the performance space in real time, triggered by a threshold of a certain brainwave frequency; thus, it functions as a sonification of the brain’s electricity – a kind of materialization of a virtual property. Pre-recorded music is perceived in the performing space before the subject becomes a knower of the actualized potential, before she perceives her thought. Does that make me a composer of the perceiver’s actual dimension? If we apply this performance technique, is it possible to actualize the virtual open-social identity, even while involved in a social collaborative interaction?

Article received: April 30, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper