What thinking sounds like

Curated by Candace Goodrich

As her final individual project, CuratorLab participant Candace Goodrich presented an audio-visual live sound installation by the ArtSci Nexus Team ‘A Well-Tempered Brain’. The exhibition What thinking sounds like took place in two modules with introductory lectures followed by live performances, featuring classical string and digital variable ensemble, first opening at Audiorama (http://www.audiorama.se – Stockholm, SE) on May 31, 2017, and thereafter at Faktor (http://faktor.hamburg – Hamburg, DE) on October 6-15, 2017. The project was generously sponsored by the Goethe Institute Sweden, the Hamburger Kulturstiftung, the University of Edinburgh and Keele, ASCUS, ArtiScience, Audiorama, Faktor, and the Global Young Academy.

The team consisted of artists Anton Koch and Mark Matthes (also known as Chamberlab), with guest musicians Ruth May and Andrew Krell, as well as sound musician and theoretical physicist Dr. Sergey Kostyrko, and molecular biologist Dr. Alexander Kagansky and bioengineer Dr. Paul Roach.  The immersive experience of What thinking sounds like, resulted from ongoing experiments with making sounds from the neural network data in the study of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.  The conceptual artistic approach to scientific research used classical music composition methodology in order to gain new perspectives in data analysis. Ordinarily, data is examined graphically, however in this case, the ArtSci Nexus team drew upon the complexity of sound diagnostics instead, in the hopes that it could lead to new discoveries.

In the pursuit of expanding interdisciplinary approaches, the team developed a process of sonification modifying ‘machine learning’ software to algorithmically recognise, predicate, and convert metadata streams into compositional means (i.e. chord sequences, transpositions, harmony and dissonance, tonal and rhythmic variations). The data set used was a collection of electrical pulse signals from cortical and striatal nerve cells of the human brain grown over a special microchip which consists of 64 electrodes that record the neural activity to be studied.  Further investigations dug even deeper, comparing the gene expression of deceased Alzheimer’s patients against non-AD samples, which is the leading cause of dementia symptoms.  The exhibition addressed critical questions such as: do the genes of one patient sound different than the other? If so, in which ways, and what can this tell us in terms of possible prevention, treatment, and cure?

By this method of sonification‘a group of neurons can be imagined like a group of instruments within an orchestra’, explained molecular biologist Dr. Alexander Kagansky; ‘Music has the potential to be a goldmine for science’.