By Sasha Glim
Neuro Music, not to be confused with the application of auditory neuroscience for therapeutic purposes, is fundamentally an aesthetic idea, says American composer and musician Gene Coleman.
“It’s about acquiring knowledge and then trying to find creative ways of applying that knowledge to the music that I want to create,” he recently told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
The talk was hosted by the departments of Religious Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, and Music. UCSB Theater and Dance and the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind were also sponsors.
American musician and composer Gene Coleman speaks at UCSB on the history of Neuro Music.
Coleman studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to compose internationally in Italy, Japan, and Germany. In Berlin, he received the 2013 Berlin Prize for music. He is now the artistic director of the Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics, a research and development space for neuroscience, music and neuro technologies, based in Bellano, Italy.
Coleman’s recent works include a docu-opera called KATA, or ‘form,’which refers to a set of movements in Japanese martial arts. The multidisciplinary composition combines martial arts, traditional Japanese music, and video. It’s an exploration of the mind-body relationship, which is a key principle in martial arts such as Karate and in Zen Buddhism, Coleman said.
“The work was commissioned for the Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 and it suffered the cruel fate of being canceled in 2020, and then in 2021” due to the global pandemic, Coleman said. Unable to perform the piece live at the Olympics, the participants recorded individual sections and edited the docu-opera together, posting the finished video online.
Excerpt from the score of RITORNO by Gene Coleman.
In 2019, Coleman devised a series of notations and musical techniques for his work RITORNO, or ‘return’ in Italian. “The string quartet played a bunch of different geometric actions. The bow is moved in triangle patterns, square patterns, in spirals and so forth. Each of those bow actions creates a different kind of noise tone combination.”
Labeled “synapse bowing,” the musical technique has the bow move on the string as if tracing the patterns of “action potentials” in the brain—rapid sequences of change in voltage across cell membranes. The concept was inspired by Eugene M. Izhikevich’s book “Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience,” Coleman said.
Coleman also uses varying amounts of repetition throughout his compositions. “In the brain, repetition of information is the bread and butter of how we organize our thoughts about the world and understand the information that’s coming into our brain,” Coleman said.
He was originally inspired by a document that showed the sequence of audio processing. A private company funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, created one of the first models that mapped auditory pathways in the brain. “This is one of the few publicly available documents from this research, because it was funded by Paul Allen so it is all proprietary,” he said.
“As soon as I saw the document, it was inspirational because of the idea of presenting the brain and the auditory system as a kind of architecture,” Coleman said. “It was an instant moment of recognition for me that there would be some way to take this diagram and the information and use it to compose music.”
Research into the cochlea and the auditory pathway also eventually became a set of algorithms to develop the dual-microphone chips that are now used in all Apple and Android phones, Coleman noted.
Neuro Music composer and musician Gene Coleman. He spoke to an interdisciplinary audience at UC Santa Barbara in January.
Coleman will be soon be opening a physical space for the Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics in Bellano, after final renovations. “I hope to be able to invite people there who have an interest in music and neuroscience for discussions and experiments,” he said.
Neuroaesthetics has always been situated in visuals, but music should also be studied from a neuroaesthetic perspective for creative production, Coleman said.
Sasha Glim is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.