I've just come across the brilliant work of Dan Lloyd, a philosopher and neuroscientist who's turned fMRI data into music-like sounds:
More videos can be found here. Lloyd doesn't seem to have written or published anything about it yet, but I'm sure that's in the works.
Traditionally, fMRI data is shown as a pattern of colored patches overlayed on a picture on the brain. This emphasizes the spatial, where of the neural activity. But it glosses over the fact that there is also a temporal, when side to it.
Listening to Lloyd's soundscapes, the ever-changing nature of the neural signal is very obvious. Some of the variation over time is just random noise, of course. But some of it represents real, ongoing changes in brain activity. So while turning neuroimaging data into music is undeniably cool, it could also be a more useful way of presenting the data for some purposes.
Via New Scientist, Eavesdropping on the Music of the Brain.
4 comments:
Although this is pretty cool, I don't really see any professional value to this method whatsoever. Temporal aspects of fMRI processing are addressed in activation maps, as they show activation in one condition relative to another, such as a baseline condition. To try to observe differences in activation between conditions by listening to music is also ridiculously unscientific, as there are a myriad of statistical software packages that do that for you, although obviously those are not without their problems.
Lastly, if this method were to come into widespread usage, could you imagine how quickly critics of fMRI would jump all over this? "Neuroscientists have progressed from looking at pretty pictures with red blobs they don't quite understand to listening to useless pretty music they don't understand."
I'm not qualified to offer a scientific opinion, but as an experimental musician this is AWESOME. It reminds me of something similar that was done with instrument readings on the Voyager probe.
In every brand of science you will find someone clever enough to do something with science and art.
Here, I do not actually consider this will have success.
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