Music and the brain - next on The Sound Barrier!

On The Sound Barrier this coming Monday morning, I will be presenting a whole show of music that looks at the interaction between music and the brain. There'll be music describing what goes on in the brain, music depicting a brain in decay, music about brains gone wrong, even music by the brain! Some of the pieces I’ll be presenting include:

David Rosenboom’s Brainwave Music
David Rosenboom is an American composer who has done some fascinating things using biofeedback from brains in his music. Well be listening to two pieces – one where the music itself is generated by synthesized electro-magnetic waves from the brain, and the other where the lines that represent those waves are transposed into music for more conventional instruments. The music that results in both cases is fascinating.

Salvador Dalí and Igor Wakhévitch: ‘In the Dream’ from Être Dieu
This is one segment from a bizarre ‘audiovsial opera-poem’ created jointly by the famous Spanish surrealist artist and the rather less famous, but still brilliant, French avant-garde composer. The music, like the words, takes you into the strange, freaky world of Dalí’s dreams, where Catherine the Great and the Mona Lisa do a striptease, and where three and a half billion people dance an orgy in three hundred thousand parking lots. You haven’t heard weird until you’ve heard this.

Nurse With Wound and Graham Bowers: Rupture
This huge piece, by the ever-experimenting avant-garde band from the UK, Nurse With Wound, joined here by sound theatre composer Graham Bowers, describes the last hour and three minutes of life after a stroke. It’s an epic piece, dark and disturbed, as it navigates its way through broken memories and a fragmented reality, will be the centrepiece in this episode of The Sound Barrier.

Simon J Karis: Your Voice in my Head
Bookending The Sound Barrier this week will be both parts of a new piece by emerging Melbourne musician, Simon J Karis. Your Voice in my Head takes you into that soft, rested place where the brain totters between being asleep and being awake, and fixes on happy things. This piece is a soothing picture of a brain at peace, with just a gentle, oscillating keyboard figure over some droning, lulling electronics.