Listening to the Mind Listening

Abstract

The Listening to the Mind Listening concert was a practice-led research project to explore the idea that we might hear information patterns in the sonified recordings of brain activity, and to investigate the aesthetics of sonifications of the same data set by different composers. This world-first concert of data sonifications was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio on the evening of 6 July 2004 to a capacity audience of more than 350 neuroscientists, composers, sonification researchers, new media artists and a general public curious to hear what the human brain could sound like. The concert generated 30 sonifications of the same data set, explicit descriptions of the techniques each composer used to map the data into sound, and 90 reviews of these sonifications. This paper presents the motivations for the project, overviews related work, describes the sonification criteria and the review process, and presents and discusses outcomes from the concert.