Le Second Square makers fair
February 17-18 at Carreau du Temple, Paris
We had a great time at Le Second Square, a makers-art fair full of interactive installations, presentations and shows. It was a fund and busy event, also helped by suddenly beautiful weather in Paris. On Friday the 17th, Samon Takahashi gave a presentation on the history, aesthetics and sociopolitical context of brainwave music, from it’s first use to contemporary composers. His talk was accompanied by a poster with a short chronology of brainwave music, research which is ongoing and will presented at the Semaine du Cerveau (week of the brain) on March 14th at École Normale Supérieure (29 Rue d’Ulm, Paris). I followed up with a presentation on the origin of EEG, and how we transform brain activity in sound. We then demonstrated the EEGsynth, creating increasingly complex sounds controlled by Samon’s brain activity. We were helped by Ignacio Rebollo (École Normale Supérieure), who translated my presentation to French.
On Saturday the 18th, we tried something we haven’t done before: People signed up to get private EEGsynth sessions, in which we created unique, improvised ‘concerts’ of brainwave music based on their individual EEG. We combined control signals from the brain electronic sounds as well as acoustic and vocal samples taken from world music. It was quite unexpected – to me at least – what amazing experiences this could create. In fact, we realized that this is the magic of brainwave music: not only that music is created based on EEG, but that thanks to the feedback-loop between music and mind, one can enter into a symbiotic symphony, i.e. a personalized ‘psychedelic’ experience. The word psychedelic comes from the ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ), meaning mind, and δῆλος (dêlos), meaning manifest, or visible. By manifesting brain activity with the EEGsynth a special kind of experi-mental is created. Of course everybody’s experience (and background) was different, but it seemed a common experience that participants learned to let the experience ‘flow’ and rather than try to get a sense of control, to allow and experience of congruence between mind and sound. This will certainly something we will be exploring more soon!
