April 2006 News Flash:

Immersion Music collaboration with McGill University and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

WIRED FOR SOUND: SCIENTISTS MEASURE BRAIN RESPONSES IN BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONCERT

In a world first, a team of scientists is going to wire up the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Keith Lockhart, along with several members of the orchestra and the audience, in an ambitious project to better understand the brain's reactions to music, and to study possible differences in brain responses between live and recorded performances.

At 12 noon on April 8, at Boston Symphony Hall, Maestro Lockhart will conduct three orchestral pieces while wearing a special electronically-equipped jacket that senses heart rate, muscle activation, and other physiological responses. Five members of the orchestra will be similarly equipped, as will several dozen audience members. Following the performance, a separate audience in Montreal will view a tape of the performance in high quality digital audio and video and identical measures will be taken from them.

The conductor's jacket and other sensing equipment were designed by Dr. Teresa M. Nakra, who is herself a conductor and music technologist. In 1998, Maestro Lockhart wore an earlier version of the jacket in a concert with the Boston Pops, during which the conductor's data were transmitted live and projected on a large screen above the orchestra, and his gestures and brain responses animated a series of abstract images.

The interdisciplinary research team includes Dr. Stephen McAdams, a cognitive psychologist, and Dr. Daniel Levitin, a musician and cognitive neuroscientist, both from McGill University. "With this project we hope to accomplish two things," Dr. Levitin explains. "First, we're hoping to see distinctive physiological signatures of the emotions that Maestro Lockhart is feeling as he conducts, and then see the transmission of them, after a time delay, to the musicians and in turn to the audience members. Second, we're hoping that this experiment will allow us to quantify differences in physiological arousal and impact between actually being at a concert versus seeing it on a large screen."

This current research extends a project McAdams undertook with the Pulitzer-prize winning composer Roger Reynolds. "Reynolds composed a piece, 'The Angel of Death,' with a number of issues in mind concerning perception and memory for music," McAdams explains. Audience members indicated their ongoing perceptions and emotional reactions to that piece using custom slider boxes, and the emotional force they indicated showed the same profiles as those the composer conceived of. For the first time ever, McAdams will employ these same slider boxes with both musicians and audience members, to reveal similarities and differences in their respective intentions and perceptions for the emotional landscape of the music.

The results of these studies will be published in scientific journals and made available on the McGill University and Immersion Music websites. McGill University is among the leading centers in the world for the scientific study of music. McAdams is Director of McGill's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, a $50 million integrated set of laboratories employing 20 researchers, including Levitin.

Nakra teaches at The College of New Jersey and runs Immersion Music Inc., a nonprofit organization that she founded to develop interactive musical experiences that bridge the gap between traditional forms and new technologies.