Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
12.1
Introduction
BCMI research has been very much motivated by its potential bene
its to the health
and medical sectors, as well as to the entertainment industry. Yet, advances in the
field tend to be assessed in terms of medium, rather than content. For instance, let us
consider the
field of music technology. Much has been said on the improvement of
technology for music recording and distribution, from vinyl records and K7 tapes to
CDs and the Internet. However, not much is said on the impact of these media to
creative processes. Have these media in
uenced the way in which music is com-
posed? Likewise, not much has been said on the creative potential of BCMI
technology. Might it lead to new ways to make music, or to the emergence of new
kinds of music?
We believe that the potential impact on musical creativity of better scienti
c
understanding of the brain, and the development of increasingly sophisticated
technology to scan its activity can be huge. Musicians have an unprecedented
opportunity today to develop new approaches to composition that would have been
unthinkable a few years ago.
In this chapter, we introduce an unprecedented new approach to musical com-
position, which combines brain imaging technology (Bremmer 2005 ), musical
arti
cial
intelligence (AI)
(Miranda 2000 ), and new philosophical
thinking
emerging from neurophilosophy (Churchland 2007 ). The
first outcome of this
approach is Symphony of Minds Listening , an experimental composition for
orchestra in three movements, based on the fMRI scans taken from three different
people, while they listened to the second movement of Beethoven
s Seventh
Symphony : a ballerina, a philosopher (co-author Dan Lloyd), and a composer
(co-author Eduardo R. Miranda). In simple terms, we deconstructed the Beethoven
movement to its essential elements and stored them with information representing
their structural features. Then, we reassembled these elements into a new compo-
sition with a twist: the fMRI information in
'
uenced the process of reassembling the
music.
The chapter begins with a discussion on the philosophical ideas behind the work.
Next, before delving into more technical details, it gives an overview of the
compositional approach we have been developing. It follows with an introduction
to the brain scanning and data analysis methods. Then, it introduces MusEng, the
system that we developed to deconstruct and recompose music and demonstrate the
core processes behind the composition of Symphony of Minds Listening .
12.2 Neurophilosophy of Music
The human brain is allegedly the most complex object known to mankind: it has
circa one hundred billion neurones forming a network of an estimated one qua-
drillion connections between them. The amount of information that circulates
through this network is huge. The operation of individual neurones is fairly well
 
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