Sonifications for concert and live performance

Listening to the Mind Listening (LML) was a concert of sonifications staged at Sydney Opera House Studio in 2004. The concert was initially organised as an evening of entertainment for the attendees at the International Conference on Auditory Display where sonification is one of the main areas of research. The entertainment at previous ICAD meetings had included sound art and avante-gard music performances, but this was the first time that the material of the research itself was to be served up as entertainment. However, the expense of staging the concert far outweighed the financial support available from conference registrations. This led to the idea of ticketing the concert to the general public. But would the prospect of listening to the electrical activity of the human brain draw the audience numbers required to raise the necessary funds? An advertisement was placed in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and we crossed our fingers that it would catch the public imagination. The advertisement described a concert of sonified EEG data in a 16 speaker sound system. The public response on opening night was more than we could have hoped for, with a queue that wound out the door, and the 350 tickets sold out. During the concert, the audience stood immersed within the custom-designed speaker dome listening to 32 channel mixes spatialised by Guillaume Potard using a Lake DSP Huron processor [Barrass et al. 2006a, b]. The EEG data set was a recording of the CEO of the Brain Resource Company [BRC 2011], Evian Gordon, made as he listened to a piece of music titled Dry Mud by renowned indigenous Australian composer David Page [Page 1997]. The LML concert pieces are available online at [Barrass 2004]. The LML concert not only demonstrated that sonifications can be a musical experience for a concert audience, but also provided material for research about approaches and techniques for sonification, and how audiences received different sonifications of the same data set. The ten sonifications were selected from 27 submissions by a jury of concert-goers, composers, sonification researchers and neuroscientists. The jury rated the submissions on overall impression, aesthetic appreciation, musical accessibility and sonification mapping. An analysis showed that the overall impression of all reviewers correlated with their S. Barrass (&) Digital Design and Media Arts, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: Stephen.Barrass@canberra.edu.au