A Lincoln Center staffer told the artistic director that his brain was doing something.
It was the end of a recent rehearsal for "Song of the Ambassadors," a work-in-progress that combines elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and the photos appeared to show Thake's brain generating images of flowers. Bright, colorful, fanciful flowers of no known species or genera, morphing in size, color and shape as if they had somehow merged.
K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, created the song "Song of the Ambassadors" which was presented to the public on Tuesday. Three singers were ambassadors to the sun, space and life, as well as a percussionist, violinist and flute player. The "brainist" was sitting silently to one side of the stage and feeding her brain waves into Anadol's A.I.
She said in an interview that she uses her brain as a prop.
Two neurosciences sat just to the side of the stage, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets, watching the brain waves of two audience volunteers.
The effects of art on the brain are being investigated by a scientist at the University of California, San Diego. A former U.C. San Diego researcher is teaching ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland. They want to integrate art and science.
They're a good match for Allado-McDowell, who first presented "Song of the Ambassadors" in January of 2021. Allado-McDowell said that she wanted to think about the concert hall as a place for healing.
They've been focused on healing for a long time. They signed up for a yoga class when they were a student at San Francisco State University because they had suffered from severe migraines for a long time. They said that they were besieged by rainbows. There were orbs of light in the sky. I got out of the classroom and ran to the hall outside. Cool liquid uncoiled in my lower back as I knelt on the carpet.
They were told that this was a relatively mild form of kundalini awakening, which is when the serpent that is coiled at the base of the spine awakens. Some people might have stopped practicing yoga. It was an indication that Allado-McDowell didn't understand reality. I didn't have a functional cosmology, that was shown to me by it.
It took a long time to get one. They went to work for a Taiwanese tech company after obtaining a master's degree in art. They had a thought while sitting in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest. They need to know how to be loved. They will become killers if they don't.
Allado-McDowell joined a research team at the internet giant. The leader asked the volunteers to lead the initiative. 50 years after the premiere of 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, artists and machine intelligence was launched. On Allado-McDowell, the connection was still there.
One of the earliest partnerships they established was with Anadol: first for "Archive Dreaming," a project inspired by the Borges story "The Library of Babel," then for "WDCH Dreams," Anadol's projection onto the billowing steel superstructure of the Frank Gehry- Anadol said, "We are transforming brain activities in real time into an ever changing color space."
Anadol responds to Skye's music, which alternates between periods of activity and rest. There was a desire to bring people in and out of a space of meditation. All we are doing is environmental noises. Slowly, we bring them out.
Allado-McDowell wants to test the therapeutic power of music in a performance setting. They wanted to know if there were policy implications. If we know that sound and music is healing, might institutions play a part? Can that lead to new opportunities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?
The jury is not in a position to make a decision.
An associate professor of music therapy at Florida State University said that listening to music has an immediate impact on moods. Individualized therapy in a medical or professional setting can lead to positive results for people who have had a stroke. She said that the approach in "Song of the Ambassadors" is different due to the public aspect of it.
The neuroscientists involved with the production are still analyzing their data. The opera did come with a panel discussion, but that didn't stop Khalil from making a prediction that the audience cheered on.
He said that the working of the mind is far away from our head. It used to be that the brain was a processor. We think our minds are extended into the world.
He said that with music, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms and rhythms onto other minds. The spaces where that happens can be thought of as healing places.
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